The first time I looked at this photo I was unable to tell what animal I was confronting. The framing is extreme. The ribs read like a landscape, an eroded terrain or the structure of something abandoned. It is not grotesque, but the warmth sears, and that gives air to something disturbing. The light flooding the skin makes it look almost beautiful, which becomes unsettling the longer you look. The flies on the right side are easy to miss. After they are seen though, they do not leave. It shifts my reading of the image from one based off of aesthetic to biological. The body is being processed as it stands alive in a field. This is not a carcass. It is a living thing in a state of visible decline. It is the collapse before death.
For a week I’ve returned to looking at this photo of bones pressing through hide, which I’ve come to assume is cattle. The photograph is from Brad Feuerhelm’s Mondo Decay, a book that focuses its critical stance on Italian Mondo and cannibal exploitation films of the 1960s and 70s. The Italian Mondo films took real or staged footage of people and places and classified them as exotic, as savage, as consumable spectacle for a Western audience. Feuerhelm takes this same logic and turns it back on the West, pointing the camera at post-industrial decay, asking what happens when the consuming culture becomes the consumed.
As I continue to look at the photograph the green of the grass below the cattle makes me think of the distinction between something that has collapsed and something in the midst of collapsing. The difference being, one can be observed from a distance and the other cannot. Like the cattle, we participate mid-fall. The animal was classified as a unit of agricultural value, something to be harvested, something an industry had use for. This image refuses that. What remains is the body, a skeleton visible beneath the skin, flies already beginning their work, the warm light that makes it look like something worth saving.
Further into my week with this photograph I cannot shake the connection to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Gray maintains an outward appearance of innocence while the portrait hidden in the attic is what takes on his corruption, aging and decaying in his place. Society never sees the truth. His social world only ever sees his face, his charm, his youth. The warmth in Feuerhelm’s photograph works similarly. It is what you see first. The bones and the flies come after. But unlike Gray, Feuerhelm is not hiding anything. The warmth is his honest response to what he is looking at. Wilde writes in the preface that those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. Feuerhelm finds beauty in what is usually kept out of frame. Western capitalism depends on concealment, on the portrait staying in the attic. Feuerhelm brings it downstairs.
Finding the end of things more honest than the beginning is a particular kind of clarity, one that Western capitalism has little use for. The cultivated eye and the complacent eye can look identical from the outside, but what separates them is what they are willing to see. The cattle in this photograph and the post-industrial world it stands inside are both being consumed by something they cannot name or see, something that does not announce itself before it is already underway.
The appetite of western capitalism does not ask what it is consuming. Cattle is a category, something that has already been classified for use.
“Cattle” is from Mondo Decay by Brad Feuerhelm. Published by Witty Books in 2021.
Link to the book:
https://witty-books.com/Mondo-Decay-Brad-Feuerhelm
A Week With is a weekly writing series focused on a single image from my art and photobook library. I spend seven days returning to the image and write about what it brings into focus about culture and the present moment.