The full implications of Britta Jaschinski's photographs take time to unfold. The innate familiarity of any zoo landscape and the accumulated weight of decades of marketing images threaten to absorb these animals into their cosy, child-like world. As the images draw you in, however, a much darker vision is revealed. Jaschinki's zoos are desolate, silent places where animals wait out eternities in captivity. Like some Miltonic outcasts from heaven, each of the species she records is locked into a version of hell.

In many of the photographs, the architecture of the zoo looms larger than the animals themselves. In 'Monkey Enclosure', for instance, a series of vast, undulating concrete steps sweep across the image. Only in the far left corner of the picture can we spot a small group of animals huddled against a moulded concrete wall, overwhelmed by this massive and oppressive landscape. Similarly, in another photograph, two polar bears pose on a cracked concrete iceberg, mocked by concrete icicles and the milled edges of the rocks. Their luminous, white fur shines against the dull backdrop and highlights the poverty of their surroundings.

The shock of this kind of architecture is most powerful in Jaschinski's picture of a beluga whale, staring out from a window cut in a sheet of corrugated iron. The surreal juxtaposition of the industrial shed-like housing against the natural beauty of the whale stands as an accusation to the builders of this enclosure. Taken as a whole, Jaschinski's photographs give the lie to the didactic ambitions of the modern zoo and force the viewer to interrogate the taxonomic enterprise such institutions represent.

The nineteenth-century zoological gardens had been created under the aegis of science. The collection and display of exotic animals was an educational project, extending the imperial sway of western knowledge. The presence of the animals indicated the extent of empire and control for each western nation while also providing labelled and categorised material for the study of science. The fact that the animals were alive, unlike the stuffed specimens in the Natural History museums, was a testament to the sustained power of empire and this remained apparent even through to the 1960s when pandas were exchanged as gifts within the context of the cold war.

Before the dominance of the nineteenth-century model of the zoological garden, such collections of animals had been made more in the spirit of spectacle than science. Rather than a collated and living archive, in which each animal is known, named and described, the earlier collections emphasised the strangeness of the animals, their unknowability. In art too, this mysterious quality was echoed in the repeated appearance of the rhinocerous from Durer onwards. Particularly in anatomical prints, the rhinocerous stood behind man, flayed or whole, pointing up the enigma of God's creation and the many forms it took. Britta Jaschinski's elegaic photograph of the rhinocerous in Los Angeles recalls this iconographic tradition and appears to document its demise as the animal turns its back on us and leaves the concrete enclosure.

In many other images from Zoo, the traces of this earlier concept of man's relationship to animals are still visible. The photograph of polar bears in Hamburg zoo, for instance, highlights the theatricality of the surroundings in which the animals are displayed. The false, concrete 'rocks' and 'icicles' do not resemble an iceberg so much as the set design for an opera. The bears, standing symetrically in the centre of the image, appear to be spotlit - a fitting vision of animals often considered to be the 'star' performers in the modern zoo. Unlike the earlier tradition of spectacle, however, the modern enclosure permits no celebration of nature. Stranded on their stage, the bears are mocked by their brutal landscape, cynically designed to mimic arctic conditions.

The makers of these zoo seem to have an almost existential view of the human and animal condition. Through Jaschinski's photographs, we become aware of ourselves as visitors to these institutions and of the poverty of vision offered to us by the zoo builders. The relationship between artifice and nature - one of the mainsprings of Western art and philosophical thought for centuries - has been reduced in these places to a cruel parody. In Jaschinski's photograph of a penguin in Hanover this human attitude is expressed in an almost emblematic image. Bisected by the surface of the pool, the photograph shows us a penguin moving gracefully under water. Above, we can glimse a forest in the background but the foreground is obscured by steam and condensation on the penguin's tank. A round platform in the water and its supporting pillar, plunging down through the pool, remind us that the penguin can do nothing but swim in circles. The potential beauty of the forest and of the animal are reduced to a mechanical spectacle, to be viewed through a cheap sheet of steamy perspex.

What Jaschinski is presenting us with in these images is the ultimate landscape of 'reason' - the rational, machine-driven world born in the seventeenth century and brought to fruition in the age of enlightenment. This project was sparked into life by René Descartes' who separated man and animal, arguing that man was self-conscious and therefore of a different order than the other beasts on earth. He claimed that 'The animal is a machine...driven by springs...a material thing'. That moment when Descartes declares that animals are simply organic machines seems to mark a vital transition in Western culture (It only took fifty years from that initial statement to La Mettrie's claim that man is a machine).

From that point in history, man's relationship to animals was altered radically, rupturing the old alliances and overturning the centuries of intimacy built up through fables, myths and stories. Before Descartes, fables followed the model of Aesop - writers used animals as masks to express one particular aspect of human emotion or thought, connecting animals to humans through observation of gesture and behaviour. After Descartes, La Fontaine became the model. In his fables, fictional creatures argued the case for their ability to feel and reason on a limited basis at least. Their tales were framed by complex philosophical and scientific debate on the changing status of animals and the ancient certainties were seen to be vulnerable. In England, the fable became the vehicle for political caricature - animals represented as cunning, conniving elements, perpetually in treason.

It was under this new philosopical and social regime that the display of animals became regimented and impoverished. The zoo, modelled on the founding myth of Noah's Ark, was meant to reveal a scientific reading of the animal kingdom, rather than a theological interpretation of the 'beasts of the field'. In Genesis, however, God concludes his covenant with Noah after the flood with a statement of great ambiguity:

and the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from youth...

Genesis 9: 21