Secret Lives Of Cats

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.”