Two Abstractions of Flesh

These are the sides of cattle that are owned by my friend John’s family. One was taken in the early morning, and one was taken in the early evening. You can tell they belong to his family because on the photograph that is mostly white, there is the JH brand. John embodies the tough and tender complexities that occur when one lives with the food that ends on the dinner table.

I call them abstractions, because they are formal exercises intended to indicate patterns and colours. But they are abstractions in another way. As someone who lives in cities, who eats meat and wears leather, who likes the look of fur and would prefer to save the life of a human being through medical research then save the live of a rabbit, or a dog or even a primate, I call those who are vegetarians, who refuse leather, who think fur is cruel, and who are against medical research distanced and naïve. They do not have blood on their hands, and the knowledge of how animals work in our lives is an abstraction.

But it is rare that I see a live cow, even living in Alberta’s culture: where eating beef is a moral imperative. So my rhetoric about the death and life of animals becomes an abstraction to. I went to my friend’s farm, and took pictures of the daily life of a mixed family farm, in order to make concrete the abstractions that mark our relationship to food and to creatures. But the shots that came out of that were equally problematic. They became aestheticisng acts. Ironically, an attempt to become more concrete becomes more abstract. The death of an animal became another way to make a pretty picture.

The photos here, then, are abstracted as formal objects, as social documentary, as personal history, and as psycho-geographic attempts at understanding where I live. Abstraction then blossoms outwards.