Deer, film by Tanya Marcuse

On September 8, 2023, photographer Tanya Marcuse found a deer that had died at the edge of the woods. She returned repeatedly to the site to photograph and film over the next nineteen months, until the deer disappeared in April 2025. From this sustained body of still photographs and video footage emerged Deer, an 11-minute moving-image work –edited, animated, and scored by Ben Stechschulte.

Marcuse's photographs incorporate interventions that verge on the alchemical, including the use of fire, transforming the animal's remains into a site of ritual. Still photographs and video footage gathered over nineteen months transform a prolonged act of observation into a meditation on time, mortality, and metamorphosis. Through Stechschulte's animation, editing, and immersive sound design, the deer seems to unravel into the landscape, even into the universe. What emerges is not a straightforward chronicle of decomposition but a metaphysical passage from the terrestrial to the celestial, from matter to myth.

Throughout her career, Marcuse has investigated cycles of growth, decay, and renewal, as well as photography's capacity to probe what lies beyond empirical fact. Deer carries these concerns into the realm of moving image, where photography, animation, and sound converge to create an elegy for a single animal and a meditation on the continual exchange between life, death, and the natural world.

DEER Nº 4818

Tanya Marcuse photographed a deer that died on September 8, 2023, for 19 months, until its body disappeared in April 2025. Rather than a simple chronicle of decay, Deer explores a metaphysical transformation, as the deer seems to unravel into the universe. Marcuse’s images transform the body of the deer into a portal—an opening from the terrestrial to the celestial.

A book of the series with an essay by David Campany is forthcoming.