How do photographic archives “animalize” or “humanize” animals in enclosed cultural spaces, like museums and zoos? I analyze the work of photographers Eadweard Muybridge, George Wheelhouse, Jill Greenberg, and Britta Jaschinski, and taxidermist Damien Hirst to interrogate the terms “animalize” and “humanize” by attempting to distinguish between animal/animalized and human/humanized couplings. To understand the term “animalize” and our aversion to being likened to animals, I argue what we are so afraid of is not being animal, but occupying the attached social position—being objectified and dehumanized. In visual media, this objectification manifests itself as frozenness and through the visual capture of animals. Meanwhile, there are two approaches to “humanization”; the conventional one is “humanization through familiarization” which engages with the similarities between humans and animals through the anthropomorphized positioning of animals. The second, less conventional approach, which I argue deserves more attention, is what I call “humanization through defamiliarization.” This concept draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “becoming animal,” entailing a direct addressal of the animal that bypasses its appropriation for aesthetic or symbolic means and presents it outside of familiar contexts. Inspired by Jaschinski whose photography of zoo animals exemplifies the process of “becoming-animal,” I created my own images of animals from the Woodland Park Zoo that are both in accordance with and a direct response to her portrayals. While the animals in her photos draw their ostensible power from the darkness of the exposure, the animals in my photos reclaim the “voracious” and “all-exposing” light with the aid of my compositional and technical choices. Finally, I discuss the politics of looking at captive animals and decenter the very medium of sight to perhaps make space for the multisensorial encounters our bodies (human and other-than-human) are capable of.