Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek’s surreal set of photographs depict felines getting airborne in their unsuspecting humans’ homes
Daisy McCorgray
They spend all their time asleep in cramped spaces, attacking anything that moves, looking disapproving and being scared of cucumbers. But apparently, the life of a cat is not as it seems. “The secret is that cats are jumping all the time, but they don’t want to do it in front of us,” says Vienna-based editorial and commercial photographer Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek. Despite the fact that he’d worked on some peculiar projects in the past (from body builders to interior shots of an Austrian nuclear power plant), capturing the curious lives of cats in full fluffy-superhero-mode hadn’t been on his to-do list. But then he got approached by the German art publisher VfmK...
“The publisher came to me and asked if I would like to do a calendar with them,” he explains. “At first I thought they were joking – a calendar is not a way I would usually publish my work! So I said: ‘Sure, we could do a cat calendar,’ as a joke. But they liked the idea and that’s how it started.”
As he began to research historical cat photography following the commission, de Koekkoek stumbled across Dali Atomicus: the collaboration by Philippe Halsman and Salvador Dali in 1948. “They did a famous picture for which their assistants were throwing cats,” he says. “My idea was to create a contemporary interpretation of their ‘cats in the air’ project.”
As a rule, cats do the exact opposite of what you want – so how do you make the most contrary of pets perform? “Throwing would be easy,” says de Koekkoek. “I wanted to form a deep relationship. So with each cat, we’d see each other for a few weeks and gain each other’s trust. This meant the cats started to react like they would when no one else was watching. When they started to trust me, they started to jump.”
Over the course of six years, de Koekkoek says that he captured just two or three pictures to document the aerobatic prowess of each cat: “Once they were jumping, it was easy to get the shot,” he says. “But I did shoot between 20 and 30 different cats, then edited down to the ones that worked together as a series.”
Elli, his parents’ cat, was his first feline subject. “I started with her, and then I went from one cat to another,” he explains.
It turns out that the silent observation practised in ‘Jumping Cats’ is a driving component behind much of de Koekkoek’s personal projects, which depict the visual culture and idiosyncrasies of the social environments on which he chooses to
