Todd R. Forsgren

I. The Frozen Black Chick 

In between the pheasant and the quail in the Korean market’s frozen poultry section, I noticed a sign that read “Frozen Black Chick - $8.99/lb.”Despite this very unfortunate translation, I was curious, so I picked up the small plastic-wrapped creature and put it into my cart.The bird was a silkie, a breed of chicken with black skin and fluffy white plumage. They are friendly birds, renowned as great brooders and in traditional Chinese medicine it is believed they have curative properties. Mine weighed a bit over a pound; she cost $11.86. 

For a few months, she sat in my freezer. When I did finally defrost her, I had to peel off a layer of plastic, discard a Styrofoam tray, and then peel off another layer of plastic. Beneath this maze of packaging, I was surprised to find that her head and feet where still attached, with five toes on each foot instead of a bird’s usual four, which is a side-effect of the extensive artificial selection that created the breed. Those five toes made the feet look oddly like human hands; my mind raced back to the name: “Frozen Black Chick.” Instead of cooking her, I photographed her. The first image I made for this project.

II. Connecting Chickens and Nuggets 

Growing up in suburban mid-western America in the 1980’s and 1990’s, chicken most often came in nugget form. Chicken nuggets strike me as a strange peak of modernist abstraction, a weird spin-off of Brancusi’s Bird in Space / Pasarea in vazduh / L'Oiseau dans l'Espace (there are sixteen versions of the sculpture, in bronze as well as white and black marble). . At this height of industrialized food, my personal experience of eating meat was so far removed from the creatures that provided me with that sustenance. 

Raising my daughter thirty years later, we’ve seen the boom of slow, organic, and local food. Food culture is so much more diverse, but the nugget persists. My daughter is named after a small marsh bird called a Sora. Soras are shy birds and they look quite a bit like little chickens, to the untrained eye. They’re a species of rail, with fluffy feathers but tiny bodies, they can effortlessly squeeze between marsh grasses. Skinny as a rail. 

When Sora was 18-months-old and just starting to talk, I was feeding her chicken breast… She took a bite and said, “cock-a-doodle-doo.” I was surprised (though chicken was one of her favorite foods, and we had been working on our animal sounds). My little girl was connecting dots: taste, sound, image, and language. Through these images, I hope to create a similar sort of connection in your mind.

III. Beef Paintings 

The earliest artworks we know of are paintings in caves scattered around the world. The most ancient are over 35,000 years old. Similar sites have been found in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe. And paintings in this tradition are still being made by some contemporary tribal peoples. Across the globe, the theme of these paintings is remarkably consistent: images of animals. Today, the reasons they were painted can only be surmised, though it has been widely hypothesized that they recount the hunt. Ritualized tales of how humans caught their food. 

Today, walking through the aisles of the grocery store, staring at the beef in particular, I think of these ancient paintings. From cheap and homogenous lean finely textured beef (aka “pink slime”) to the delicate marbling of wagyu beef, I see the cultures and values of the peoples who eat these animals reflected in the surface of this beef. Each of these four images is roughly a pound of highly stylized and processed beef.

IV. Loafs and Fishes 

Like many in the 21st century, I get most of my food from the grocery store or a market (and that is where I went to find subjects of this series). Though I’ve never been hunting, I have been fishing, often as a boy with my grandpa on Lake Erie. Afterwards, we’d clean the fish and grandma would crust our perch fillets with potato chips and fry them up. From flopping around on a line to crispy in less than an hour. 

I didn’t eat sushi or sashimi until I was 18-years-old. It just wasn’t widely available in the Midwest in the 80’s and 90’s. When I went off to college on the East Coast, Dave’s family took me to a sushi restaurant and I ordered 18-pieces of tuna sashimi. I knew I liked tuna fish, after all, as I’d had it many times out of little tin cans that said, “the chicken of the sea.” It wasn’t at all what I expected. 

Sashimi continues to defy my expectations about food preparation. In some ways, sashimi is certainly one of the least processed of meats: raw wild fish. But in others, sushi is among the most complicated of today’s global food industry. A wide variety of species, some of them quite ecologically threatened, are shipped around the world, intensely refrigerated, and carefully cut by highly-trained professionals.

V. Pepper #30 

There is a famous photograph I always show in my Introduction to Photography class. It’s a picture of a pepper taken by Edward Weston. Pepper #30. Not the 30th pepper he photographed, but his 30th attempt at photographing this one green bell pepper he was really into. It’s a sexy pepper, luscious and curvy, seductively lit and printed in silver gelatin. My students think it looks like a woman’s back. They’re not the first to describe Pepper #30 this way. The photograph is direct, but it challenges the viewer: how human can a pepper be? 

This question normally leads my students into a conversation about photography and objectification: object into human, but also human into object, right? We talk about the old trope that photographing a person is stealing their soul. You are what you eat. These images look at meat in a similar light. I am more interested in how meat, and photographs of meat, are consumed. So, I look directly at the it, as an object for reflection like Weston’s pepper. Seeing how through abstraction, or the lack of abstraction, just how much an object meat can become, as well as how human it can become.

VI. The Weight of a Soul

When I was a student at St. Raphael’s Elementary School, the nuns and priests taught me that through a series of ritual practices bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Not just symbolically, but actually. That’s the part I struggled with; it seemed grotesque to be eating someone. But if I wanted to go to heaven, I had to do it. Otherwise, it was hell for me. So I ate the tasteless wafers of bread and wine that tasted like vinegar, “body and blood of Christ.” 

“Amen,” I’m still quite squeamish about blood and guts. But I do eat meat. There are diverse cultural reasons, rituals, and practices surrounding the consumption of animals. Sometimes it is for physical nourishment, others it is for spiritual nourishment. In some cultures, all animals have souls, while in others, none do. Some creatures aren’t eaten because of their relatedness to humans, or their perceived intelligence. Other times it is merely the ‘yuck’ factor that prevents us from eating them.

VII. The Act of Inspecting Meat

Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle is famous for how it was misinterpreted. He wrote the book about harsh working conditions for immigrant laborers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, but instead it led to reforms such as the Meat Inspection Act. As Sinclair said, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” Similarly, this series of photographs, which I think of as primarily about culture and abstraction, will resonant with many on issues of the production and consumption of meat. 

I’m not a stranger to images being interpreted in different ways as the viewers knowledge of context changes. Before starting this series, I worked on another project featuring animals. Photographs of birds, in fact, at a very specific moment in scientific research. These birds were alive, but I often had to explain to viewers that they weren’t dead. So, it is strange that the first image for this new project, my second serious attempt at photographing animals, was of a bird that is definitively dead. In fact, all the images in this series are of dead animals that are meant to be consumed, in one way or another. I bought them at grocery stores or supermarkets and then scanned them on a flatbed scanner. Afterwards, if I could stomach it, I ate them. 

Obviously, I’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian, though I have deep respect for those who are. I know vegetarianism is more consistent with my other values, like the importance of biodiversity and minimizing my carbon footprint. In the post-industrial condition I live in, it seems humans are embracing animals, as food or as pets, at the same time we’re subverting our own animal side. I chose to photograph this meat because I think it inhabits an interesting liminal space: between human and non-human, between animal and object.