A year after my mother unexpectedly died, I travelled with my mentor, photography legend Mary Ellen Mark, into the hidden districts of Oaxaca, Mexico. I crossed over into the corners of a city that even locals have difficulty navigating. Yearning to literally face death with my art, and consumed by my mother’s sudden passing, I found myself compelled to photograph a local slaughterhouse. To visually capture the full severity of life and death.
The first series of shoots, which happened in 2008, was an uncompromising examination of process and product. After almost a decade of shooting fine art erotica, my fascination with the slaughterhouse merged into my fascination with the human body. It was impossible for me to ignore the fact: that the texture of pig is so similar to the texture of human.
So my initial compulsion to photograph the slaughterhouse production process quickly developed into an opportunity for powerful emotional interaction. It became a project that reached far beyond the journalistic scope of an essay on the production of meat; the series evolved into a discussion and a meditation on the fears, disgusts, and cultural barriers that surround the raw elements of death, and the tender vulnerability of the body’s life.
"For Consumption Only" aims to reinvent an often-dehumanized industry of flesh, fur, and bone. It offers confession to the basic terror of existence, and it requires all who participate, all who see it, to undress their own perceptions of survival and expiration.
The photographs with the white masks are my personal favorites from this series. The anonymity combined with a spirit flow and beauty of the nude in the image most appeals to the aesthetic I was hoping to capture. It addresses the many dialogues I am having with myself and others. There is an anonymity to meat production. There is an anonymity to death. There is a spirit that exists beyond the flesh that is so anonymous it scares us, the loss of ego. I believe these photographs tell stories of some basic human fears, what happens with death, and the consideration of what happens to the soul with such realities… the beauty that exists in the most raw of realities.