Horenstein approaches his subjects abstractly: He looks for patterns and composition, rather than shaping his images as portraits or narratives.
"Iguanid Lizard" demonstrates a masterful approach to pattern and texture. Horenstein cropped off the head of this lizard, which sits on a rock. The focal point becomes the cruciform juncture of tail, trunk, and hind legs, where the viewer's eye homes in on details: the reptile's stripes and the more delicate stippled pattern of its scales. It's a soft-focus image that blurs more deeply around the edges. The texture of the animal surrounded by the stony texture of its environment, surrounded by the increasingly grainy texture of the film, all coalesce into something haunting and dreamlike.
In contrast, "Hippopotamus" has a keen focus. Horenstein often gets so close to his subjects he shoots just a small part of them ("Indian Rhinoceros" offers up a tail looking like a calcified carrot, fitting snugly between cratered legs). In "Hippopotamus" we see only a part of the beast - its back as it wallows in shimmering water - but there's no doubting its magnitude. Its dark, wet hide crinkles and glistens; near its tail, you can make out the vertebrae. All the light bouncing giddily off the hippo's back and the water counterbalances the sheer mass of the animal.
There's almost no mass in the feathery, angelic "Common Carp." Horenstein has photographed a school of the pale fish from above; they appear to swim down the picture plane, their scaled tails wafting left and right like long, willowy buds in the breeze. "Brown Sea Nettles" is a gorgeous, threatening thicket of jellyfish, each translucent sack trailing dark threads embedded in delicate, light, lacy tentacles.
