Robin Schwartz is a 60-year-old professional photographer who lives in New Jersey with her husband, daughter, Amelia, and five companion animals.

For her impressive photography project titled “Amelia and the Animals”, Robin Schwartz documented her daughter Amelia’s adventures among the animals. Since she was three-and-a-half, Amelia has been posing with animals both exotic and common in an extraordinary way.

Amelia is 14 years old. In many ways, she is your average American teenager: since she was three years old, she has been her mother’s muse, and the subject of her photographs. However, not every mom is a world-class photographer with a predilection for photographing animals. And it’s not every teenager who has portraits of herself with elephants, llamas, ponies, tigers, kangaroos, chimpanzees and endless dogs, cats, and other animals—portraits that hang in the collections of major art museums around the world.

Amelia and the Animals is Robin Schwartz’s second monograph featuring this collaborative series dedicated to documenting her and Amelia’s adventures among the animals. As Schwartz puts it:

“Photography is a means for Amelia to meet animals. Until recently, she took these opportunities for granted. She didn’t realize how unusual her encounters were until everyone started to tell her how lucky she was to meet so many animals.”

Nonetheless, these images are more than documents of Amelia and her rapport with animals; they offer a meditation on the nature of interspecies communication and serve as evidence of a shared mother–daughter journey into invented worlds.