Daniel Kukla

"We as humans go to great lengths to satisfy our desire for a connection with the natural world, especially in our interactions with wild and exotic animals," says Daniel Kukla, who took this photograph of an empty neotropical rainforest exhibit at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn, New York. But zoos, he says, "often obscure the conflicts inherent in maintaining and displaying captive wild animals." For his series Captive Landscapes, Kukla photographed the interiors of animal enclosures adorned with painted landscapes and plastic plants at eight different zoos across the United States. Kukla asks us to consider whether we create such scenes not for their educational value, but because they make us feel better about the animals' captivity.