This Most Monstrous Food

The manifold stories of American violence must also be told as a single, relational history. This Most Monstrous Food explores the intersections of Genocide, Capitalism, poverty, myth, and the decline of stability & community in the United States.

Cannibalism, as I define it, is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.  — Jack Forbes

How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong look like right.  — Mahkatêwe-meshi-kêhkêhkwa (Black Hawk)

Photographers such as Watkins, Jackson, O’Sullivan forged the myth of a pristine, empty, profitable West.  Like them, I use a large-format camera and am slow & methodical.  Unlike them, I hope my project, This Most Monstrous Food, instead rends the cataracts of myth to make visible that myth is too often blinding.  To this end, I’ve sought evidence & allegory of American violence; it is a totalizing violence, a centuries old project of domination, an engine accelerating anger, disorientation, and alienation.

I’ve traced the scars of pioneer wagon-ruts and the stairwells of monthly-rate motels.  I’ve made portraits of both the wealthy and those who have little choice but to endure America’s endemic cruelty.  I’ve visited Presidential memorials & birthplaces and the unmarked former homes of serial killers & cannibals.  I’ve photographed dioramas & re-enactors who stage half-truths & fictions upon the flayed back of stolen land.  I’ve also followed some — but not yet all — of the Donner Party’s nearly 2000-mile migration.

In late 1845, a journalist coined “Manifest Destiny”.  Months later, the Donner Party followed their rite westward.  They took a “shortcut” endorsed by a white-supremacist conman but found only unmarked, overgrown terrain.  Delayed, they reached the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevadas too late in fall, were waylaid by blizzards, and could go no further.  Before the snows relented in spring, half died.  Survivors cannibalized the deceased.  This harrowing event epitomizes American history and, but for a profound, substantive change of course, foretells its future.

It turns out the U.S. historically boasts more incidents of cannibalism than any other industrialized nation; it has also nineteen-times more documented serial killers than the second most prolific country.  A friend and Oneida tribal member once told me, “All the Presidents are Serial Killers.”  Indeed, as the Commanders of a Genocide, U.S. Presidents have brutalized, displaced, and murdered untold millions of indigenous people.  America's fascination with and manufacture of Serial Killers & Cannibals runs diversion for an unseemly truth:  behind the curtain of American power sits the archetypal psychopath.

Like my photograph, Indigenous Figure with Swastika, I want to convey that the manifold stories of American violence must also be told as a single, relational history.

In Albert Fish's Childhood Homes at the Eisenhower Memorial, bronze figures flank a relief of Africa.  America’s unprecedented national wealth flows directly from the expropriation — or, “cannibalization” — of Africa’s people and resources.  Serial-killing cannibal Albert Fish grew through boyhood on this memorial’s site and bore witness from here to the birth of the Gilded Age. 

Had there been no Gilded Age, there would neither have been Lange’s Migrant Mother.  Income inequality also reigns today, for equality contradicts the logic of capital.  Can a mother in Casper, Wyoming symbolize resiliency & hope while flanked by children whose birth lottery may foreclose access to fundamental rights, to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

How many of the tourists pictured in Panning for Gold, South Pass City WY will connect their recreational gold extraction to national divisions, to cruel deprivations borne by privatized resources, to the California Genocide (1846-1873), or to Genocide, writ large?  How many can we fairly say have been educated to even do so?  I sure wasn’t.

I believe in mutual recognition and the power of an honest reckoning with history.  Many of us are desperate to know Truth, to be more than mere endorsement, enemy, or selfie, and to cease enabling and reenacting deceptive & destructive — indeed, blinding — national mythologies.  My photographic practice compels me to commune with and photograph diverse others.  This is its greatest gift to me, for I’m continuously reminded that most Americans are generous and yearning.  They are reason enough to fight for a different and better United States of America, one built not on violence but on compassion & care.

This Most Monstrous Food is my salvo in this existential fight.