Scavenging Carcass

It's that time of the week again! And this time I'm not emo, promise!

:)

I'm actually really excited about my photos this week so I'm not really sure where to begin. I was really excited to show them in class too which is really weird because critiques actually make me queasy generally and I try to get in early enough to put my photos up to get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. This week I came in early because I was really excited about my photos and wanted to get reactions as soon as possible, crazy!

Anyways, Monday was my 21st birthday. It was nice. Birthdays aren't generally too exciting for me but since I stayed awake from noon Sunday until 7:30p.m. Monday (I was writing a paper and I procrastinate...then I had photo, then I had the class the paper was due in, then my mom and brother and grandma and grandpa came to see me...no sleep) so I consider Sunday part of my birthday too, if only because part of Sunday was dedicated to making photos and I had so much fun making them that I want to consider that my birthday celebration

So I went to bed at like 10pm on my 21st birthday, obviously a wild and crazy time with mom, bro, grandma and grandpa :) I had fun with them though and I'm really glad they came. Not much you can do on your 21st birthday when it's a Monday night and none of your friends are 21 anyways!

Back on topic, I guess I'll start with my apples, which were part two of my pretty literal interpretation of the Holocaust through fruit. This time, with apples, this time with perpetrator and victim together. I had had this idea for awhile and for awhile I had considered having some other fruit (a pear?) overseeing these emaciated apples to be like "Oh, this fruit is persecuting this other fruit for being different." But then it occurred to me that the Holocaust and other genocides are based on a perceived difference, not that there is an actual difference between perpetrator and victim. Someone who is Jewish is no different than someone who is German, who is French, who is American, who is Turkish, who is Armenian, who is whatever. It's a perceived difference but when it comes down to it we are all humans. So I had the perpetrator be a fellow apple. I also thought it was pretty arrogant of me to think I have a right to stereotype one type of fruit as a perpetrator. Who am I to say a pear is more prone to fruitocide than say a peach or a plum or an orange? I decided that putting that on a particular fruit was too much and not really my place.






I rather like the way they turned out in terms of how really emaciated the victims are in comparison to the big fatty and I had a good time messing with saturation to kind of give it more of a downtrodden, sad effect

Next up is my true pride. I had bought a bunch of fruits and decided to massacre them. I did so in a very orderly fashion, systematically and with actually fairly little mess (comparatively).



I shot my photos, many of them in fact, then told my friends Beth and Charlotte that they should have some of the fruit because I was done shooting and it wasn't right for me to just waste food. I put the lens cap back on my camera and started tidying up some of the fairly ordered mess. And then I thought, I should just snap some shots of us scavenging these carcasses so I shot a few frames of Beth and Charlotte being vultures and when we had completely destroyed the fruit and our tummies had their fill, I was left with a more beautiful destruction than I could have ever hoped for. The best things come completely unexpectedly, don't they? We really massacred that fruit. We were on the floor so table manners were thrown out the window completely. I had watermelon all over my face and in my hair. Pomegranate seeds and skin were everywhere, watermelon juices mixed with lemon juices mixed with pomegranate juices mixed with grapefruit juices mixed with lime juices. And by the way, pomegranate and lemon= absolute heaven. I kind of like to think of it as a mix of all the massacres of the past flowing into one collective history of mankind. I'm a history major, I can't help but think that way and massacres are not the doing of one nation against one people. Time and time again it is humanity that disappoints, whether through direct perpetration or through complicity or through overlooking, avoiding, denying. It's never the problem of one nation or people, it's a problem of humanity. Or you can always interpret the destruction however you like, I take to my photos my own preoccupation with massacres so that becomes my interpretation but I like to think you can take them however you like.



I might post some of the progression shots of how it turned from ordered chaos to absolute chaos at some point...

PEACEOUTMOTHAS

with love, Shaylyn