Assignment #3 Chapter 4

Something that recently caught my attention was a photography project that my cousin was working on. I do not recall what the assigned project was, but it was something general that let the students use their own imagination. My cousin is a vegetarian so she chose to do something that represented herself in that manner. For the project she took pictures of different parts of people’s anatomy (appendages) and photo shopped them to resemble some of the everyday foods that we eat. For example, she took a picture of my leg and she was going to make it look like a chicken leg (I have yet to see the final product). Other ideas that she had were to take a photo of a tongue and put it on a grill to look like a steak and take a picture of my uncle’s toes and put them on a hamburger bun. The one photo that I did get to see was the one where she took a picture of my aunt’s nicely polished fingers and put them into hotdog buns. It was very surreal of a feeling that I got when I looked at that picture, but I got the message that she was trying to convey. Through this work she is showing the viewer how this is the same position that we put animals in when we eat them every day; it’s just something that we don’t realize because we are so conditioned to it. I guarantee that very few people sit down to eat a hamburger and think of what the cow may have gone through so that we could enjoy its meat. She completed this project in such a way that the viewer is able to understand her perspective on the subject, whether you agree with her or not. She also has the photo displayed in black and white so that when you look at the photo you aren’t distracted by the color and you see, again, the message behind it.

In a way this could be a stretch of realism because it is showing us something that would be seen by the eye, but in a slightly twisted manner. Although the piece may not be aesthetic in a way that most people would perceive beauty, there is beauty behind the message that she is trying to get across to the viewers.