Just meat

While working on a self-portrait (it is presented in the single works folder), I decided to develop this theme further. For a very long time I thought that a person is something higher. That this is a soul or some kind of unknown matter, energy. But at one point I was faced with the realization that emotions and feelings can be programmed. A person can decide for himself what to feel, whom to love, whom to stop loving, what to worry about, what to think about. All thoughts can be controlled, they can be completely destroyed and changed. It’s just hard to control bodily reflexes and desires. They are beyond the control of man. You cannot curb hunger, the desire to sleep, you cannot stop your salivation or blood circulation.
At the moment of realizing this, my ideas about who the “Man” was became more down-to-earth. Faith in something higher disappeared, and I realized that a person is, first of all, flesh and a set of instincts. Man is an ordinary animal. It seems to be a very simple truth, but many people have been forgetting about it lately.
Therefore, I decided to create this series of diptychs comparing the human body and animal flesh.
Why is the human body alive and the flesh dead? I’ll answer: for the series it was important for me to show flesh and meat. If I had photographed a living ram, it would have been perceived as a living being, a being with a soul. No one sees a soul in dead flesh. That’s why I compared the animate body with a dead, lifeless carcass.
Why a sheep carcass? Because lamb is the most neutral meat. In some religions, the ram is a sacred animal and is often sacrificed.
For the same reason, I photographed a male body, not a female one.