Seafood
For the series Seafood, I photographed preserved marine invertebrates from a university collection. These animals look as unlike ourselves as do plants. Mosof us don’t think of them as animals at all. If we do think of them, they are…well…seafood. Biologists routinely regard them as animals, but biology objectifies animals in the name of science.
Just as zoologists obsessively collected these creatures originally, so I obsessively photographed each specimen. As they had followed a system for classifying and naming the species, so I had a system for naming the photographs: each work titled after the “sea-color” of the background plus the genus of the animal, then each individual photograph numbered, as individual specimens in a collection are numbered.
In a way, the photographs extend the collection into the realm of the absurd. How many specimens does it take to define a species? How many photographs does it take to depict a specimen? When does the collecting urge go too far? Is it all right, ethically, to collect some things but not others? Is collecting other beings justified if it leads to a greater understanding of nature? Or is it time to move on to new methods, new paradigms for making sense of the universe and our place in it?
Carol Selter
1994