Captive (2017) Jo-Anne McArthur (born December 23, 1976) is a Canadian photojournalist, humane educator, animal rights activist and author.

McArthur was the primary subject of the 2013 documentary The Ghosts in Our Machine, directed by Liz Marshall, and with Keri Cronin, she is the founder of the Unbound Project, which aims to celebrate and recognize female animal activists.

[10] McArthur appeared in the top 50 of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Champions of Change contest,[11] and on More's fourth annual "Fierce" list.

McArthur said that she was "so thankful that this image resonated with people", hoping that it might "inspire us all to care a little bit more about animals ... No act of compassion towards them is ever too small.

[21] It is a photograph of an eastern grey kangaroo and her calf in a burned eucalyptus forest near Mallacoota, Victoria, in an area damaged during the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season.

Humans are as much animal as the sentient beings we use for food, clothing, research, experimentation, work, entertainment, slavery and companionship.

The objective is to photograph our interactions with animals in such a way that the viewer finds new significance in these ordinary, often unnoticed situations of use, abuse and sharing of spaces.

[32] The activist Bruce Friedrich, in a review published by The Huffington Post, described it as "the most gorgeous book [he had] experienced in many years", one which "offers haunting sadness, [but also] intense hope".

[33] In The Guardian in 2020, Ziya Tong selected the book as one of the best to widen readers' world views, writing that "McArthur brings an empathetic lens to the grim reality – mostly unchallenged – of millions of lives spent in captivity".

The Archive serves as a repository of media from the wider We Animals project that can be freely used by individuals and organizations working towards animal-protection goals.

The merging of close and sustained photographic observation and detailed institutional history and critique is what is most lacking in the current generation of zoo books.

[51][52] Writing in The Guardian, Olivia Wilson described the book as shedding "light on industrial scale factory farms and slaughterhouses ... [revealing] in often bloody detail how little we know about what goes on within these windowless walls".

[55] The book's photographs were displayed at London's Natural History Museum,[56] Berlin's F³ – Freiraum für Fotografie,[57] and Perpignan's Visa pour l'Image.

[58] With Keri Cronin, an associate professor of art history at the Department of Visual Arts at Brock University, McArthur founded the Unbound Project, a multimedia and book project aiming "to recognize and celebrate women at the forefront of animal advocacy, in both a contemporary and historical context", and to "inspire our audience to do what they can to make the world a kinder, gentler place for all species".

[59][60][61] Contemporary women profiled include Anita Krajnc, Carol J. Adams, Hilda Kean, Wendy Valentine, Leah Garcés, Seba Johnson, Lek Chailert, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, Marianne Thieme, and Elisa Aaltola.

[62] Historical women profiled include Lizzy Lind af Hageby, Ruth Harrison, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Dorothy Brooke, Caroline Earle White, Louisa May Alcott, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Fanny Martin.

[65] Writing in Variety, the critic Peter Debruge said that It's enough to make you sad, not for the animals (to whom human cruelty is nothing new), but for McArthur, this beautiful young woman who feels so deeply for those not of her kind that she carries their collective suffering around with her daily.