Dan Florin
Photography

The photographs for "Slaughter House" were taken over several trips to the Karl Ehmer facility in Lagrangeville, N.Y. in the early 1980's.  I had contacted Mr. Ehmer and requested to visit his slaughterhouse and, to my delight, he agreed.  I appreciated his willingness to allow a young photographer into his facility.  Although I had previously seen animals on farms slaughtered and deer processed, I was not quite prepared for the scope of work done in the building.  However, despite my initial reaction, I found the workers professionally engaged in their respective roles under the supervision of Karl Ehmer himself who worked alongside his employees. I watched as each member of the plant did their part, and observed how they taught each other the craft of butchering an animal.   For the casual viewer, the assembly line processing of animals in this fashion may seem disturbing, yet over the few visits I made I found myself to be desensitized to the process.  Regardless, despite the passing of years,  I still retain vivid images, smells, and sounds that are indelible memories of those visits. The sampling of images provided here are a small representation of several hundred exposures I made during my visits.   Photographs taken on 35mm TriX /Gelatin Silver Prints / Web-based Images are Reduced Resolution Scanned Negatives