Folkcal Fraim 11
Chicken Plant Survivor Focal Length / Plattsburgh, New York / TSE / 2013
Kill Floor Calendar
Local businesses like churches, funeral homes, grocery stores, barbershops, insurance agencies, automotive garages, and dry cleaners, all gave out advertisement calendars. Second only in usage to the tree shaped car-fresheners which came in artificial fragrances like Royal Pine, Wild Cherry, Black Ice, New Car Scent and Summer Linen, these calendars (which would become the maps of our year) used photography, usually a portrait, to grab our interest. And like so many disposable marching orders, the calendars were cheaply produced and designed in a manner allowing the recipient the option of ripping off the small paper parking lot of dates (month-by-month) till all twelve, like the disciples of supper, had fallen. In our community, the most popular one featured a near perfect image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Sunday Best, the business attire of the black Baptist church, robeless but respectful, outside the pulpit in a suit and tie. The whole cardboard spiritual shebang was bronze, a brown and tan fantasy, as if mildly ordained by the preset and pre-yellow miracle-blessed gospel of the sun’s liquid honey, the Promised Land of numbered blocks minus both bricks and straw, the one purpose fits all reminder that every day is a dream faith-governed by the struggle for afterlife equality.
In the time it takes an entire church basement of elders to box Sunday dinners for the congregation and choir, I could describe the homes, our wall-to-wall carpeted apartments, that had at least one Dr. King Business Card Memorial Calendar. And, aside from the chump change profiles on coins, these work and rest schedules were the most Romanesque objects in our lower-class dwellings. No one could tell us he wasn't Black Jesus Caesar when he spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The media fed us “slain” but the community digested it as “slaughtered,” and every year (right before the Christmas trees were kicked to the curb) another "call to the end" of the earthly door arrived, featuring the same “Good Reverend Doctor” (as he was called by the amen corner), free of charge like another dropped call to the Lord, mass-produced then tossed like pamphlets of propaganda from enemy planes over our already occupied plans.
Over time the calendars became souvenirs and power object props (mighty memorabilia) for those who sought them out and placed them in movies or exhibitions when the trendy, soulful winds of Blackness were reincarnated as costume art by the romantic theoreticians of cultural nostalgia. When still attached, these paper months meant as much to us as government issued food stamp booklets, public transportation transfers, and grocery store circulars, so when I was hired in 2012 by Local Union 342 (New York City) to begin a visual archive of its workers and compile images for an annual calendar (the sort of “easy does it” camera work for money and experience) on more than one occasion I found myself standing in blood in another century in the remains of a former meat packing district, surrounded by butchers who may have at one time been criminals, the thick scent of the ghosts of crimes committed in slaughterhouses, the produce specials of survival it took to turn jungles into nature, nature into farms, farms into markets, markets into families, families into nations, and nations into corporations––their extra savings, their best deals, mushroom gravy on the motel balcony. Standing in blood, holding my breath, eyes inhaling the legit side of the false history of Salisbury Steak, the Civil Rights scam, African American, a trademark filed under meat and processed food. Beef People, people with beef, beefing. Muddy blood in the nasal cavity, famous flesh on the front page, does strange things to the gut in the mind.
Now, as in a photograph, allow me to (politically) direct your eyes: several male workers standing on a loading dock, smoking, shooting the shit, more so with the theism of their own cultural know-how, their chakra eyes, than the unemployable outlaws in their mouths. Located along the West Side Highway, parallel to Chelsea, the scene on the dock could have been any mildly urban street corner in Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx. Face value and anti-delectable, I was familiar with the human sculpture, the substitute substance of Stouffers, a goddamn stage show, more David Smith than Richard Hunt. I saw them from the car and, approaching on foot, I began my work without asking, like I had a natural and known place among them. One of Giacometti's skinnies cometh. I flipped the camera up and down, from it, as if checking to see if it worked while focusing on objects off to the side of them but of equal distance from me to them. Fully loaded and feeling fluid, I was ready, landmine ready. I had to beat them to their visual opinions of me, our mutual poses. I wasn’t alone. I had a social cushion, a savvy Union Rep, but for my own confidence I was determined to establish a comfort zone that would allow me to move among them freely — even “shoot the shit” back at them if I had to. Didn’t matter if they thought I was the kind of crazy that, as a result of radical rational dieting, became cray then (brokenhearted) doubled in the mind to resurface as cray-cray; didn’t matter whether (or not) they trusted me. There was no time for that. Like word, camera is bond — minus the chunk jewelry. I was making a calendar, not accepting a Grammy for a stanza. I was taking photographs, not dropping science. I had, however, dropped my cameras so many times they were as beat down as basement-practice mics. Worry not. I was about to step into a refrigerated environment, about to be cold chillin’ in what some might consider to be the belly of an ideal food basket. To be free and not fucked with (too much) while working, that’s all my soylent, my meal replacement powders, my vegan protein shakes and bars wanted, and to dance between the head splitters and hide pullers of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) like a landscape photographer on a well-positioned auto lander.
A liquidated form of flesh, human fuel, the donor flow, blood. There’s nothing supernatural about being mock tender, nothing spiritual in the plant/line layout of Sir Bottom Flap Meat, nothing but the pursuit of an engineering certification. Pulleys, rollers, hooks, and other iron and steel tools of the sacrificial trade. Through the lens: apparatus became contraption, gimmick became gizmo, and device became utensil. The monstrous ancestor of the sewing machine vs. a large prehistoric blender with a fan of curved blades in the heart space. In any other setting, royal court or abandoned warehouse, they would all be mistaken for torture devices: Skevington’s daughter about to serve the brazen bull several pears of anguish. A walking beam like a transmitter of force, the first format of man not the pre industrial contrivance of the holy of holies. And still, one could not ignore what amazing machinery and machinists it must have taken to craft such (nearly organic) hardware, all stainless in appearance if not in purpose, all designed to meet the operation, physical and psychological. Meat choppers and grinders. Electric bone saws. Sausage stuffers. Jerky shooters. Curing Chambers. Hamburger Presses. Food Dehydrators. Stuffing Horns. An overhead rail system of trolley axles, wheels and swivels like the high intestines bleeding shackles, bolt on. Boxes with holes for ventilation, meat wrapped in well-designed nets so that the dead thing will have just enough oxygen (to be eaten again) in the afterlife. It’s all on the negative, the flesh scraps, and yet there’s no way, even in lossless RAW, to reduce the noise of suffering. To the trucks went the uncompressed vocabulary of consumer protection, and then from the trucks––the same tripe of digestion was hung on hangers in various neighborhood sentences, chained to our love of stewed lingo, the enchanted land of grocery store etymology where the roasting pots, resembling the severed heads of flashy minotaurs, remain frozen in looks and glances.
Use the leaner Nikkormat, the black EL, when photographing the abdominal flank, but flabby mirrorless straight talk optics for those times when the hoof pullers overreact like sag, lens sag, in a posthumous spread. Seasoned like an oven’s worth of ad hominem attacks without a reason, without a round eye of round, without a point of view, eye warmth no longer matters. Under blade temperature there was one kind of cold outside on the loading dock and another inside the plant where the kill floor equipment mapped regions of beef. And those regions (chuck, rib, shank, brisket, short plate, flank, loin, sirloin, and round) were further cut into the calendar's retail (telling) of months. Artificial, refrigerated, shivering so much all I had was poetics––the middle cube in the metal ice tray, neither high or low brow. Igloos and pen guns like penguins in the cold prose but the shutter, defrosted by constant usage, cut through the atmospheric chill of being trapped in-camera, “Best If Used By” the length of trust no scent, outdated, can revive. “Put this on,” I was told, as a man in a hard hat handed me a long thin white coat and a work bonnet to cover my hair. Loose fitting, the protective uniform changed my vibe as if I was being held by something lazy. No one told me to layer, to wear a hoodie under my white coat. Old blood on the gloves that handed me the coat, so I photographed them against the numbers of the address of the building, 525 in an oval red blood cell. No idea why I asked him to place his gloved hands on the numbered egg other than trying to be bossy-odd-original. I wasn’t exactly the photographic equivalent of a muckraker, but I knew how to shape a message or give charge to an existing cause (via visual persuasion) with a camera. Opinionated and perhaps a bit too moralistic, no one had to tell me that room temperature is bacteria’s best friend. If I could, I would use flash (Orpheus not Elvis) to distribute satays of panoramic fairness throughout the plant. I saw things, the things behind things, and the things off to the sides of things fast without having the objects become grainy. With a camera, I could feel the interior lives of objects not given the opportunity to live as we live. I traveled, as if shot through a lens, into them. And there I stayed until later when, after seeing the photograph, I was released a fuller witness. “Don’t take my picture, man, I’m not here.” “Too late, but I’ll delete it.” “Fuck, let me see. Ah man, take another one,” then he stepped back and lifted a sharp knife that looked, through the viewfinder, like a piece of cold lightning, a shiny point of dangerous exclamation in search of the tumors of magnetic north. Tint of fear, a cold sweat. My nose started talking just in time to prevent me from saying something stupid. Nosebleed, no, but it smelled like one, like an oil spill in a metal canister, neon Cocteau (mirror pool, lips on the palm), the blood of a photographer. The whole table was a cutting board. The meat kept coming, so did the air-tight heavy-duty foil, freezer paper and plastic wrap. I kept expecting a head, any head. Salome’s on a head of salami, fermented and cured. Butchers, two of which had gotten in a fight a few months back and stabbed each other, were also artists, freezer burned blade runners. “Y’all want to take a picture together?” I asked. Evil laughter fell out of their mouths, fell all around the knife-lit room, onto the cold morsel-populated floor like roasted skin. “Hell no!” and “Get the fuck out of here!”
Hard not to feel like I was a part of a delegation that had come to inspect a nuclear power plant or to make sure the facility was following USDA requirements, but I wasn’t. I was just a carnivorous cameraman, a giant visual tapeworm, a pair of juju eyeballs come together in a small format. Steam, throat-slick, slippery floors, smoke, men with water hoses, men stringing up meat, mops moving through blood like dreadlocks, the multiple pores of bloodthirsty drains looking up at the raw celestial sky of conveyor belts. Is this what I was looking for and, when asked for the images for the calendar, will the camera hold back, piss on the painting, lie? The room was huge, long, no corridors or walls except the ones made by the hanging air reef of beef. Rows, lanes, the conference space where, without a translator, caucus sounds like carcass. Pinkish white mixed with geographic shades of red; the larger a piece of meat, the harder it was (for me) to identify the body part. Anatomy, autobiography. Once, I thought, this is the largest heart I have ever seen. Meat hung; meat stacked on poles with spikes, totems. Tiny pyramids of flesh at workstations, bloody teepees. In black and white the hanging meat resembled stone. In color, the revelation of the method of the hues of all beasts from God-man to man, mankind to human, humanity to transhuman, every soft and improved ruin––landslide and scorched terrain, the livestock of Jericho slain by Joshua’s military campaign. It’s bloodshed that changes the council of where you are, the soil, the identity of the little monarchs within mountains. The headquarters of the United Nations building was built on the site of former slaughterhouses. More bloodshot eyesores than mom and pop stores, the angry culture of regulated agriculture like mealtime in the belly’s morgue, a chewable death, lives as edible as the earth, cattle pens, gas works and coal yards. Groundbreaking surprises, mineral rich regions caught off guard, oil for food, extraterritorial forks. Geneva, Vienna, Nairobi. Why does the jurisdiction of aid have so many acronyms, interests, and chambers? Assembly and Security, both contaminated by armed division, by what former UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold poetically referred to in Markings (1963) as the struggle between professional duty and spiritual responsibility. Pieces of Patrice, more cold cuts, less Congo, more Cold War. A monolithic door of consciousness, the 39-floor slab contains a quiet room for meditation, for international justice.
Indirection in every direction there was something to shoot, something artfully seep-proof, in shackles or in a knocking pen with a sturdy door. It was like moving through a 3-D technicolor diorama of Picasso’s Guernica. A tight fit, leg transfers, the marketplace of trenches. No need to squint, close one eye, or use my knees to get below the beefy UFOs borrowed from the Book of Ezekiel, the lightbulb-eye near the top center of the cubist bombing was more than enough to illuminate the widely acclaimed carnage, but there I was back in the reality of the life of art, sensitive to the mayhem of the modern moment, an amateur documentarian alive in a vivid x-ray of one of Cubism’s most efficient harvest coolers. Untaken photographs circled me, an astral plane of insights into the unseen jumped in and out of my lens, bait in a thought bubble, the moon above a river’s bayonet of liquid bread in the finder's eyecup. On my way out, the foreman pulled me aside. He wanted to know if I had spent any prolonged time around raw meat or large amounts of blood, not at all, then he asked how I felt. Still excited by the outing, I said, “great!” “Good,” he said. “Now go straight home because you are going to be sick for a few days.” He was right. This system upsets the chemical demon in the stomach's machine of storms. The creative battlefield had defeated me. No human can work for long in an open vein and not become a part of its living surrealism. If you’ve ever wondered what’s in blood, I’ll tell you: blood is full of images, the stuff of pictures, photographic cells, and you either have access to your own or you don’t. There’s internal art and external art, the later contains an akashic anemia. The sickness hit me while I was in the passenger seat of a car––dizzy against the window, the gnawing weakness of nausea, then the boiling in the belly befitting of the tray of stop bath, the condensed eternity beneath Hart Crane’s bridge, upset. I watched the skyline in front of me and the one behind me both point downward. For a little more than two hours, I danced with and between what I can only describe as the macabre, swinging, fresh hanging easels of Francis Bacon’s flesh peeled paintings: an exhibition of human veal, human lamb, and human beef, steaks at the stake, the interiors of a pathogen struggling with its own emerging hazards, photographic peacekeeper come hither, swirling pig meat and pigment, delicious Chef’s Picks ready to become prime pics, supplier and master purveyor of the dry age, USDA geostrategic, from Poland to the Bronx. More so than any prehensile scream, the ribs of an art that feeds only on art has a sharp, asterisk shaped saw in its memory.
Calling all caterers of all appetites that do not know the hour of their rancid release, their final delivery schedule, a calendar is simply menu, a consistent callback of sequential squares, a flipbook, a re-mooring to the tidiness of spatial agreement, planned time, a diagram of mini manicured occasions, the lending of control as an abstraction, no delicious entrees, sides or platters, just the bodily estate sale where hunger triple-takes the same photograph three times a day, thirty per monthly hunt, the hungry man of bills, budgets, and banking. Calling the rhythm of production, such an easy-to-step-into routine of prepared time, the inversion of never-ending weeks that end as they begin, weakly, another week ending in the wreckage of salary. Yet another tool, time management, broken into 60s, 24s, 7s, 4s, and 12s. The camera is drawn to the calendar of calving season, the straining, the pushing. March: Switch heifers to lactation ration, prolapse and retained placenta. April: Check bulls for breeding soundness, magnesium oxide in the developer. May: Prepare fly control program and implant steer calves with aperture-priority to fend off grass tetany. June: Rotate the young bulls like a tripod in an adobe pasture, then score the body condition of all females like a water supply of reclaimed musicals. July: Use shutter ghosts to scare the pinkeye out of the herd. Any leather eye patch or lens cap, minus Nippon mold, will do. August: Wean the calves off overexposed nursing. Begin at night during the gentleness of black camera invisibility. September: Vaccinate calves for Lightroom-spirosis. October: Pregnancy check photoshoot. November: Stop bath for lice if not light leak tested. Also provide salt, analog/digital mix. December: Begin heifers on balanced darkroom techniques for last 1/3 of pregnancy. January: Remember to refrigerate rolls of color Vitamin A. Consult Veterinarian if gelatin (emulsion) diarrhea occurs. February: Purchase additional bulls, dehorn (& castrate) focal lengths longer than a policeman’s hard stare, and dip navel and iris of newborn calves in iodine solution. The camera keeps track of arrivals and departures, where, in the flickers in the frame, the candles and ashes of the cycles of our lives, those periods of time waiting to be gobbled by the skirmishes of globalization, have lost the ability to influence the earth to stay still and the sun to move. Once upon a time, a birthday wish could eliminate a wasteland. The am, arm, aim of an era composes a visual oath of minor anniversaries, small choiceless situations glued to larger choiceless situations like a call to time ending not the busy signal of the end of time. If nothing else, close your napkin as if searching for permission from a greater nature. Continue shooting at the checkerboard, the matte Fresnel field, till the hurt of the hunt, the doughnut-shaped microprism has been crowned and darkens.
I didn’t get sick again, but the dinner platelets of having been sick stained me like a petty plague in need of a grass-fed transfusion. Still shaky on my pins with a sixth sense, no doubt resulting from my sunrise blood walk, I can tell who the meat handlers are within a minute of entering a locker room of workers. The opposite of a clown (in courage) and the coroner of a drummer (in craft), no butcher can remove the vocal bones of his profession from his inner pandemonium. It’s easy to peep the ones without safe-handling labels; they always raise at least two knives when you take their picture, and they never look away. Sweaty machines that eat and spit out raw meat, moist heat. I know you think you choose your dinner, but having seen the eyes of a dead fish target a customer from a grave of small ice, I beg to differ. We became puny when the markets got super, and dependent, unable to hear the backroom blades, no real access or understanding of the industrial wizardry that churns a living animal into ground like waste. Sounds vulgar and violent, I know, but sometimes, in any aisle, there’s just a young man sitting on a box with a price gun licking products, not an electrofishing bargain shopper in a work program, intentions set to stun. Apropos, an apron, rubber bulletproofs appropriate. Shrimp that springs back when pressed, but not wild caught. Farm raised aquaculture, hard shells, stacked on tray racks. Clean belly cavities, scales adhered to skin, tightly, bright eyes not sunken. Here, my former friends, is something to swim in: Never forgetting is not how you prevent a thing from ever happening again. Work right. Goggles and gloves must be worn when using meat room degreasers. Work right. Hose down the photographer till all the color film is exposed, no different than the boar’s head on the Toledo scale, no springs, just the honest weight of sprocket holes, a porous wholeness. Pathmarks of perforations all gone slang in the Iselin parking lot like perfs applying to become state-sanctioned performance artists. Usted tiene derecho a representacion de la union. The flour must be fluffed, then tossed like a cloud of steer through bakery air, fire extinguisher inside, mid work week rodeo doughy. Finally tall enough to push the cart, so let him have a Flag Day in butter like a live lobster. Look at your life, every holiday, deadline, and recurring date of birth, and tell me the calendar does not carve your already collaged living corpse of breathing––extra blocks, blocks without dates, blocks for the faces of workers, the names of the holidays in both English and Spanish, falsely bilingual as a roll of slide film, only one of its sides able to absorb the grammar of the waterfront. Get on it, like Upton Sinclair and Budd Schulberg, and stay on it. History, a cuisine of centuries, boneless as a cutlet. Blood purge, night of the long knives, gray carousel of lamb through steam in a shop window, a slow turning.
Memo to the Marxist sector of ghetto Mars, I have a good memory, but I don’t remember anything, absolutely nothing, about the five-hour drive from Brooklyn to Plattsburgh. Perhaps there was a portal along the way, a mind eraser, I don’t know. Am I me? Let me check the photos, I don’t know. A lot of cats have turned into spaceships since that trip. I do, however, recall the dream I had the night after I was told that my last assignment would be to photograph a chicken plant in upstate New York. Yes, you are allowed to view what is being exposed, but at the risk of a meatloaf mixture of psychoanalysis, I’ll spare you my nightmare and the full apnea of my aperture. A hag rode me into a deep darkness while vomiting poisonous nuggets, all minimally processed. The pure silver spoon under my pillow, the one I learned about from The Negro Book of Folklore, did not help. Thick and bottomless was the darkness, full of another presence. I couldn't move. A whole ranch sat on my back. Light meter and meat, cushioned layers. I quickly realized what the camera wanted. It wanted to reveal to me that blood is the fallen state of light, that I should shoot the chicken plant in Raw files without any compression or processing, fully capturing all the data in stages, messy stages, and eat with my fingers like I take photographs, with my fingers, purposely not cleaning my plate, the frame never coming in contact with spoon, fork or knife. Colors, preserved. Flesh does not need skin to absorb life, but it does need skin to absorb light. Air fryer, pressure cooker documentation. Rewinding the roll of film, making the blood of time go backwards, making it age in reverse, like all the children who used to be adults (the old faces), the ones with grown folks’ jobs, selling fruit and flowers from wooden carts. Why do they smell like cabbage and smile like watery lettuce? One must be very selective when trying to take current photographs that look like older ones––no cell phones, no microwaved cars, no sportswear logos. Focal length is not without logic, culinary reasoning. Annoying ass photographer, scared by torpedoes, circling the worker’s lunch break and buzzing like a fly, Nikon Saturn, steak sauce on the focusing ring. Technique as tenderizer. Rare: unfocused. Medium Rare: focused foreground, unfocused background. Medium: time-lapse, slow heat, no flash. Medium Well: unfocused foreground, focused background. Well Done: fully focused, foreground and depth of field. Sizzle of invasion, side of genocide. Nevermind the battery test, let it baste. If the shutter does not open or the mirror is not returned to the original viewing position, the whole meal will burn, not just the choice cuts.
Like a library of cages cropped like crops, the chickens were perfectly shelved into the side of a truck. Murrays, the logo was an illustration of a chicken carrying a hobo’s bindle, blanket stick, the footprints of chicken feet, blessed, suggesting the path from the sun as it rises behind the confident bird. I snapped a rare (unfocused) image of a man standing between the unloaded cages, his back to the camera, in overalls and apron, watching the plucked, upside-down chickens go by, first on what looked like roller coaster tracks, then individually, hanging from a metal conveyor belt, the merciless, upper railroad to a nearby chef. I really wanted this photograph but, as I said, it came out rare and there was no way to get a camera into the scalding tank to shoot the actual killing and plucking. From the exterior of the plant, through the large doors, the inside looked like a mangled amusement park. Without a doubt, it was the most machine I’d ever entered, the most evil-efficient. In the surreal vein of Lenora Carrington’s trumpet, imagine a camera capable of hearing birds having heart attacks on the way to processing, the industrial sized mop being pushed by a Black man dressed like one of Bradbury’s book burners, guiding blood into the underworld. Seven drains, like seals, the mysteries of pyrophyllite, chicken-blood stone: a symbol of bravery, discernment, great sacrifice and selflessness. Serious faces behind the grill marks of laughter, room temperature, as the women on the defeathering line care for the undressed, rubbery, headless birds. They even turned to me, while working, to pose for pictures, deli sturdy, plump fowl passing by like casualties of farming; Later, I photographed two families in their homes, each sat solemnly as if in classrooms, and in need of rest, like steaks, after cooking. During one of the visits, like an antidote to his own patchwork of anxieties, a boy played his harmonica imitating me playing my camera. Condiment width preference: ribeye not fisheye. Leaving housing, I made it back to the plant’s killing floor, so many red maps, just in time to see the only survivor of the day, lil’ Chicken Little, limping away from the massacre while the machines (dripping with the bright red remains of coop citizenry) pulled the poetry of poultry apart like wings off a calendar. I’ve never felt more carbon-based than I did in the air outside the plant. All progress is not progressive, premium shrapnel, well done. Under the table where time (call by time to end) works, nothing holds infinity like a modified egg. If you are going to be a blood vessel, a nutrition fiction, use all the organic and technical devices, raw and cooked, your shopping cart can hold. Here's the last thing I photographed: a severed claw on a bed of asphalt. Someday, if you are starving, I’ll show you.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.