For my second appropriation image, I wanted to try and stick to the same theme as the first.  I began by thinking about other company slogans which you could read more into, still focusing along the animal cruelty lines.  It was then that I thought of the KFC slogan “Finger Lickin’ Good!” in relation to articles that I’d read in the past on the mistreatment of chickens for fast food chains.

I decided to research this a little further and try to find some images showing this cruelty to the chickens.  I found a website which is dedicated to naming and shaming the fast food giant and, although I’m not 100% sure on the authenticity of their claims, they raise some good points.  I found an image that I thought was suitable and began manipulating it to convey the message that I wanted to put across.

ORIGINAL IMAGE — The anti-KFC website that I found claimed “KFC suppliers cram birds into huge waste-filled factories, breed and drug them to grow so large that they can’t even walk”.  I decided to use this image as a lot of the other alternatives were not a very good quality, and I wanted to enhance the image’s effect by ensuring it’s high quality.

The first idea that came to my mind was to do with the well known “because you’re worth it” L’Oreal campaign slogan, paired up with a dramatic flick of the model’s hair.  I thought about how staged and almost cringeworthy the campaign was, and how it had been on the receiving end of jokes and mockery for almost as long as it’d been around.  I thought about taking something so universally recognised and mocking it directly – but I wasn’t quite sure how I would go about it.

During the Photography workshop on the 29th September, we were all discussing our ideas when the workshop leader, Michelle Walsh, added something onto my seed of an idea: animal testing.  It’s commonly known that some companies cruelly test their products on animals, with devastating and painful results on the animals’ behalf.  I decided to do some research on L’Oreal’s part in this.  I found that although the company previously did test their products on animals, they vowed to stop completely in March 2013.

I still wanted to see for myself the damage that companies like L’Oreal can do – and have done – to animals, so I used Google to browse through a selection of images showing this.  I was shocked at the images I found, so I decided to use that “shock factor” and turn it into the “message” that I was trying to convey within my three images.

Due to the nature of the area I decided to focus on, I was unable to take the photos myself (as obviously I don’t have access to places such as animal testing labs), so I made the decision to use secondhand images for the sake of my message.

ORIGINAL IMAGE — This was the image that I decided to use for one of my appropriated photos.  I felt that it was disturbing and upsetting, which reinforced the message of animal cruelty that I wanted to convey.

I wasn’t quite sure where to start when given the task to create three appropriation images.  Coming up with ideas for projects has never been my strong point, so I found myself focussing on the techniques of the photographers that we’d been shown – such as Richard Prince – instead of trying to come up with my own style.

I started thinking about the concept of originality, and how our work is never really unique – we naturally take inspiration from a collection of different work that we’ve seen, piecing it together to form our own.  I then told myself that this was the whole point of the appropriation task, the point was that we looked at someone else’s work and gave it another meaning.  The exact title of the assignment was: ‘how do your images allow the viewer to renegotiate the meaning of the originals?’  I therefore tried to focus more on the message I was trying to convey than what I was planning to do with the images (in terms of editing).  From here, the real brainstorming could begin.