Politics in 2008: A Photograph

sabbath999

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Hopefully this photo won't get me baa-aaaaaaa-aaaaned

politics.jpg
 
I guess you mean to transport a certain message which deals with "sheep" and "being fed" and all that, but I don't QUITE get it. I feel the human element in these is too strong, too dominating and too light against the black faces of the sheep with their lovely colour eyes (which, however) are only the background, dark and blurred...
 
Actually, the title was something to get people to look at the photo... most of the times when you don't put a catchy title here they are ignored. I will let people draw their own conclusions on political tie-ins.

I didn't take this picture as a political statement... in reality, it is a picture of people feeding captive goats... goats that live in pens and who depend for their entire livelihood on people to feed them.

The idea behind this picture (and other photos that I take involving animals living trapped in a human world) is to show how humans dominate them... how the very nature of these animals is stripped away to nothing more than waiting for their human captor to feed them.

Where I shoot this captivity, or this captive power, I put the animals in the background and I focus on the human aspect of it. The goats in this picture are secondary (dark, out of focus) because the subject of the photo is the people and the calculated feeding of the herd one nibble at a time. The beings in power in the picture are the beings that are clear and brightly light, the beings in captivity are dark and out of focus.

I will let anybody who wants to draw political conclusions from this (as my somewhat joking title refereed) to do so on their own, I don't want to violate the rules.

I used a similar approach to the monkey I posted a couple days ago, where the camera was focused not on the monkey but rather on the caging...

The reason I did this was twofold... first, I wanted to show the caging strong and clear... the shot is about the captivity of the monkey, not yet another picture of a sad looking monkey... and secondly, had I blurred the cages and focused on the monkey the shot would have looked horrible... there would have been a really distracting blurry weave in front of a sharp face, and the shot would have been a throw away.

Shooting through cages is very tricky stuff if you actually want good pictures, as exampled in my later picture of the same monkey in my "snarl" post.
 

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