EXHIBITION DETAILS

The Value of A Dollar | Jonathan Blaustein

March 11 - April 30, 2011

Jonathan Blaustein is a New Mexico-based photographer, writer, and professor at UNM-Taos. Images from his current, conceptual project "The Value of a Dollar,'  have been published on the New York Times Lens blog, and countless websites around the world.  In 2010, He was interviewed about the project on Public Radio's "Marketplace."

His photographs also reside in several important public collections, including the permanent collections of the Albuquerque Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. 

Jonathan has exhibited his work widely galleries, museums and art fairs in the United States, and is currently represented by Zane Bennett Contemporary Art in Santa Fe.  He writes about photography for several photography websites, including A Photo Editor, Fraction Magazine, Finite Foto, and photo-eye Magazine.

STATEMENT

I’m interested in the way photography is used to deceive.  Millions, if not billions of advertising dollars are spent annually photographing food and obfuscating reality.  Fast food conglomerates are certainly the worst culprits, but everywhere we see glamorized versions of what we eat.

Food is clearly a potent symbol of wealth, power, health, and globalization for the 21st Century.  Its value is determined by the price of oil, its transnational transport contributes to Global Warming, its ingredients entice America into obesity, and its production processes animals into floss and mush.

The photographs in this project attempt to strip back the artifice; to depict food items as they were sold, (minus packaging,) without styling, retouching, or artificial lighting.  Each image represents a dollar’s worth of food purchased from various markets in New Mexico.  The subjects exist as equivalent amounts of commodity, and nothing more.
The resulting images allow for a meditation on the power and seductive nature of the photographic medium itself.