In order for
Liebling to document work in a slaughterhouse he had to actually
go there, a trip few of us would relish taking. In photographs like
these there is the power of an additional message: I can show
you this because I was there. The document becomes one of
both the slaughterhouse and Lieblings personal experience.
For Liebling,
as for every major figure in photography, pictorial power arises
from the desire to be with the world, not merely to
record but to register the fact of ones own presence, to project
ones self in the act of capturing a scene. (Alan
Trachtenberg, Jerome Liebling Photographs, 1982)
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There is an odd beauty in this
photograph of a slaughterhouse wall. The abstract shapes of all the rectangles
are like a collage and the shimmering texture of the walls are painterly,
like brushstrokes in a painting. At first it isnt even clear what
the cow is doing here, dangling at that strange angle. Or is it that the
picture is not right-side up?
When Jerome Liebling went to slaughterhouses in South St. Paul, Minnesota,
to ask permission to photograph the work there, he wasnt interested
in exposing the horror of a slaughterhouse or promoting a vegetarian lifestyle.
In fact he wanted to document what very few meat consumers would ever
seethe reality of preparing meat for human consumption. In documenting
the process, he created a photograph that expresses the conflicting emotions
that many feel over the way meat is processed.
My photographs deal primarily with what I considered the most heroic
moments in the process: the slaughter, the symbolic relationship between
workers and animals, wrote Liebling. For the men on the killing
floor, there was always great danger balanced by their skill and stoicism
mens hands trained to function like machines performed the one act
in the process that could not be mechanized. (The Minnesota Photographs,
1997)
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