Social Comment

     The cat dissection portion of my Vertebrate Anatomy class left me feeling disconcerted; the animals came from animal shelters around Billings and were put down after failing to be adopted.  After each laboratory session spent dissecting, I went home and played with my own cat, Annie (herself a rescued stray from an animal shelter); throughout my interactions with her I felt guilty and dishonest, and I asked myself: how is it that people welcome certain animals into their homes to be treated as members of their family, and simultaneously treat other animals as subjects of experimentation, food sources, or simply as pests to be exterminated?  This image is meant to force the observer to reconcile two portrayals of human interaction with animals.  The first photograph depicts my sister Ellen with our cat Annie; I wanted them to interact lovingly, but I also wanted the image hint at something sinister.  Ellen's eye contact with the observer suggests knowledge, information that we share about a different facet of human-animal interactions.  The second photograph portrays the dissected cat; the head of the animal is in focus, while the open thoracic and abdominal cavities are blurred as a result of the shallow depth of field.  I didn't want the gruesomeness of the dissection to overwhelm the photograph; I wanted the viewer to have to search the image in order to discover its true subject.  In order to emphasize the parallels between the dissected cat and Annie, I placed their eyes in roughly the same plane and used minimal color to focus the viewer's attention on the animals.