11.21.09
By Dona Ann McAdams | Gallery

Milking It

Dona Ann McAdams, From the portfolio “The Last Country”, Georgie Hurd, West Virginia, 1998

Only a few generations ago, cows, horses, oxen, pigs, sheep and goats formed part of Americans’ everyday cosmology. Even in our cities we lived among ungulates. They were a constant reminder that our human lives depended upon the lives of other animals. Over the last century, animals who fed us disappeared from public life. Hidden behind factory walls or locked in feedlots, their lives became unfathomable to most Americans, who encountered their ungulates only when served — unrecognizably — on a plate.

What is the cost of living separate lives from animals who feed us? Aside from the concerns about health — our own, the animals’, the planet’s — the larger cost may in fact be psychic. — from Brad Kessler, new afterword to Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese (paperback to be published by Scribner, June 2010)

Photographer Dona Ann McAdams works with underserved and overlooked communities, including Appalachian farmers, performance artists, asylum seekers and mentally ill residents of New York City homeless shelters. Recently, she began photographing working animals (racehorses, dairy cows, goats) and their human caretakers. This image is featured in her exhibition "Some Women" at the Opalka Gallery, in Albany, New York, through December 16.

McAdams’s work has been exhibited and collected by the Museum of Modem Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the International Center for Photography. She and her husband, Brad Kessler, live on a 75-acre farm in Vermont. — Adam Harrison Levy



Posted in: Arts + Culture, Photography



Comments [2]

The photograph is beautiful and her work sounds important.

I question the headline and the writing of this post, though, which seem disconnected from the material. I wrote a brief post on my site about how I feel it could have been better.
Tweedy Abbott
12.11.09
09:53

Dear Mrs. McAdams,

In one of my classes we have been discussing the use of technology and how sometimes this takes away from the way we used to be like as in having farms for food and so on. I think it is good that you are going out into these overlooked communities to show that there is people living this way around us. I am a photographer and I haven't been out experiencing these types of communities and to spread the environments these people live in. I from the article that you went to the New York City Shelters, I am not that good yet with taking photographs of people, did they ask you why you were taking photos of them or inquire or did they mostly continue with their daily routines and ignore you? I'm trying to get more hints in how to work with my future career as a photographer and all the hints or tips would really help.

- Doug P.
Doug Pryor
10.12.10
09:10


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