CORY, Charlotte (Bristol, 1956)The Visitors

Charlotte Cory's images rework cartes de visite, the photographic visiting cards that were a Victorian craze. The faces may now be forgotten, but in their place Cory adds the heads of animals—stuffed animals preserved for posterity in museums. The visitors are truly creatures of fantasy each so delicately posed that we think, Can that be real? A noble tiger dressed in imperial regalia, a haughty kangaroo with a cricket bat. What kind of extraordinary creatures are these? The Visitors is a remarkable book that draws us into an imagined world of immense power and originality.