Interesting Photo of the Day: Farm Family Portrait

Interesting Photos  •  Portrait Photography

This isn’t your typical family photo—unless your relatives include a llama, a shaggy cow, a black sheep (doesn’t every family have one?), a rooster, and a goat. But it really isn’t a family photo at all—more like a fashion shoot, according to photographer Rob MacInnis:

“Untitled #3” by Rob MacInnis (Via Imgur. Click image to see full size.)

Part of a series named “The Dog & Pony Show”, in which he looks through his lens at animal subjects as if they were human, this photo and others in the series “take the conventions from the fashion world and apply them to the underclass barnyard animal,” according to MacInnis.

Though at first the photo comes across as humorous and creative, there’s some deeper thinking behind the concept. As MacInnis told My Modern Met,

“I began photographing farm animals because I was interested in using them as a metaphor for the fashion model. I wanted to draw parallels between literally consuming them, which we do everyday, and the way the photograph ‘consumes’ its subject….I’ve experimented with different genres of photography; fashion, family portraits, documentary, narrative, and panorama, always using farm animals as the subject matter.”

He further explained in a New York Times feature that many of his group shots like this one are meant to resemble “Annie Leibovitz star-studded photo shoots,” like those you might see in Vanity Fair.