The Whale Hunt is a “storytelling experiment,” narrating a native Alaskan hunt for a bowhead whale. The artist, Jonathan Harris, took a photo at least every five minutes (even when he was sleeping by using a timer), and has organized these thousands of photos into a “photographic heartbest.” The more photos he took per minute, the faster his heart is beating.
The art? Perhaps misconceived – I found most of his photos rather boring. Taking a photo every 5 minutes and then posting them all means that there’s a whole lot of photos of empty rooms and lines of snowmobiles.
But the content? Amazing. There’s a pruned down highlights section, but I don’t think it gets to the heart of what was cool about these photos – the actual process of butchering a 36 foot whale. Harris has photographed seas of blood, yards of intestine, and enough meat and blubber to feed a village. And that is right, because that is exactly what this whale is going to do. The photos really communicate the whale-as-valuable-resource. By the time the hunting group was done, the only bit of whale left was the jawbone and the bloodstained ice.
Via Metafilter
Subscribe via RSS feed
Billy, Millie and I want you to know that we are very proud of you for finding your ptiloical voice and making such excellent picket signs. We are against eating goats (and basset hounds, but we haven’t read a description of that anywhere yet, thank goodness), and we hope you’ll continue to bring issues like this to the world’s attention.Also, we recommend that you do not watch The Alaska Experiment, as some nasty things happen to goats on that show..-= Rebecca @ The Book Lady’s Blogb4s last blog .. =-.