http://bit.ly/2RTThvy
These Chickens Lay Designer Eggs for Big Pharma http://bit.ly/2Dzevpw Photographer Daniel Szalai envisioned an employee-style grid as part of the Novogen series. "I wanted to portray the chickens as workers in the industry," he explains. "I thought it was important to shoot many to reflect the scale of mass production." Szalai observed that the chickens have "really individual faces." Over the course of a six-day shoot in the chicken shed, Szalai began to individually recognize some of the birds he had shot earlier amongst the group. "Of course we anthropomorphize animals," Szalai says. "We have a toolkit to try to understand them, it comes from very human place." The Budapest-based photographer chose 168 out of 7,000 images for his Novogen series. Novogen includes 11 "environmental" shots of the Hungarian facility and process for vaccine production. Novogen White egg shells are monitored for color and thickness. Carriers are each inserted with a electronic chip to track their location and serve live data relating to their genetic potential. "I really saw how they were being held, in pure clinical environments," Szalai says. "All aspects of their lives are transferred into numbers." "I knew that the title of the series had to be Novogen," explains Szalai. "It's very exact: This company, this chicken, this production company." Szalai submitted Novogen to the 2018 Breada Photo Festival. The theme for the annual festival was "To Infinity and Beyond." Szalai was denied when he first requested access to the Hungarian egg farm. When finally let in, he had to wear a "white space suit" and gloves in the facility. After spending six days shooting portraits in the chicken shed, Szalai says he couldn't eat poultry for three weeks. Szalai included the facility's marketing materials and management guide as part of the series, including a chart that tracks the Novogen carriers' lifespan. Szalai likened this document to the personal data we share with big tech: "With all this data that's being collected around us, we allow organizations to monitor and control our behavior. Photography plays an important role in documenting this." Szalai didn't observe that the animals experienced any sort of cruelty: "The chickens are looked after very well, just deeply controlled." "We need these chickens as biological carriers of our technology," Szalai says. "We can now make crazy things and develop them very far. But what about living cells? How do you manage or manipulate those?" Digital Trends via Wired http://bit.ly/2uc60ci January 25, 2019 at 09:09AM
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
Archives
October 2020
|