bounty
“We are human in good part because of the way we affiliate with other organisms.”
- E.O. Wilson
To kill an animal for sustenance is at its heart a very human act - distinct from humane - in the sense that our place at the top of the food chain is an evolutionary dictate to consume meat. But our perception of that act’s significance is contingent on context and reflected in the records we keep. Workers at slaughterhouses don’t usually pause to snap pictures of cows and their butchers – they don’t seek to record the moment just after the kill or the specific characteristics of each animal before it is cut it into usable parts. Industrialized slaughter is banal; it’s a job: standardized, efficient, and invisible to most of us. All we see of it is the particular cut of meat we take home from the grocery store. There is little motivation to document the act itself.
To kill an animal in the wild - to hunt - is an altogether different matter. It, too, is a human pursuit but it is revered by enthusiasts as serious sport. Unlike the workman butcher, the hunter is a hero and the documentation of his or her bounty is a record of dominance. The pictures hunters chose to make of themselves suggest a different relationship to what is, arguably, essentially the same as the butcher’s act.
It is these hunters’ records that provide the basis for Bounty. Using a Google image search for variations on the term hunters and then culling through the results for what appear to be personal, rather than professional, photographs, I amassed a collection of images documenting hunters and their recent kills. I then removed the hunters using the healing tool in Photoshop, a tool designed to correct blemishes in human skin. What remains of the hunter is a suggestive stain lingering over his or her kill – the ultimate ghillie suit. Viewers are left to identify with the animals themselves. In some cases these animals appear to be sleeping peacefully; in others their postures are strange and in defiance of gravity or there is obvious blood. The simple act of erasure shifts our attention from the beaming faces of victorious hunters to their bounty, a contemplation of just what it means to be human.
- E.O. Wilson
To kill an animal for sustenance is at its heart a very human act - distinct from humane - in the sense that our place at the top of the food chain is an evolutionary dictate to consume meat. But our perception of that act’s significance is contingent on context and reflected in the records we keep. Workers at slaughterhouses don’t usually pause to snap pictures of cows and their butchers – they don’t seek to record the moment just after the kill or the specific characteristics of each animal before it is cut it into usable parts. Industrialized slaughter is banal; it’s a job: standardized, efficient, and invisible to most of us. All we see of it is the particular cut of meat we take home from the grocery store. There is little motivation to document the act itself.
To kill an animal in the wild - to hunt - is an altogether different matter. It, too, is a human pursuit but it is revered by enthusiasts as serious sport. Unlike the workman butcher, the hunter is a hero and the documentation of his or her bounty is a record of dominance. The pictures hunters chose to make of themselves suggest a different relationship to what is, arguably, essentially the same as the butcher’s act.
It is these hunters’ records that provide the basis for Bounty. Using a Google image search for variations on the term hunters and then culling through the results for what appear to be personal, rather than professional, photographs, I amassed a collection of images documenting hunters and their recent kills. I then removed the hunters using the healing tool in Photoshop, a tool designed to correct blemishes in human skin. What remains of the hunter is a suggestive stain lingering over his or her kill – the ultimate ghillie suit. Viewers are left to identify with the animals themselves. In some cases these animals appear to be sleeping peacefully; in others their postures are strange and in defiance of gravity or there is obvious blood. The simple act of erasure shifts our attention from the beaming faces of victorious hunters to their bounty, a contemplation of just what it means to be human.
