Dead Things By Eliza Daffin

Using The Process Of Decay To Reveal The Beauty Of Deep, Southern Landscapes

By Jennifer Sheffield

Eliza Daffin is a farm-raised, rural woman who can rewire an oven, but you’re not likely to find her in the kitchen, after her brothers return from duck hunting, or a deerstalker drops off a fresh kill at her dad’s butcher shop.

She is, instead, standing in the corner of the store, waiting to get her hands on a bag of organs, or already plucking feathers off the birds before spinning them on a homemade taxidermy wheel for her next photography project.

Daffin’s work also includes stunning landscapes of the humid, mossy swamps and rows of cotton fields she loves, she gets so giddy about gory stuff, but after spending some time with her it’s easy to see how one can get sentimental about cow skulls.

RESTING ROPER

“People tend to purchase art with an uplifting feeling,” says Daffin. “I flirt with that line.”

She says when she started taking photos of “dead things” during her freshman year as an art student at Columbus State University (CSU), it was a “touchy subject,” she admits. “But I figured out how to cross it for gallery space, social media, and vegans,” she said.

RUMINANTS

“If you abstract a decapitated cow’s head and focus only on its teeth, it’s not so freaky,” Daffin said. “I want to make you think about the teeth; not a whole animal.”

One of her favorite things to capture are “guts photos,” she said. “If I get light and contrast right, it becomes beautiful.”

RETURNING

Daffin’s black and white images are all developed by hand in a dark room. It’s been a learning experience of trial and error, from taking photos of her dog with a Wal-Mart instamatic, to experimenting with 35mm film. She now works exclusively with sheet film with which she can enlarge a picture of a flower to the size of a dinner plate.

EUFAULA_NO.2

“With a manual camera, you’re out surveying,” she explained, describing a format from Civil War-era photos that used wet, glass plates. In today’s digital market, it “is not a convenient way to do things,” Daffin said. “But my dad was always building houses and my mom sold clothes, so making is a part of my life. I enjoy the lack of control, too, since there’s no ‘undo’ button, I really have to be intentional with every piece of art.”

Hunting is also a Daffin family tradition. “My brothers have hunted since they were old enough to hold a gun,” she said, “and, I worked at a foxhunting barn during college. It’s not an instinct, but it’s a part of my culture that I enjoy. I grew up in Columbus but we keep horses, and we have a shelf in our freezer that has ice cream, up top, hamburgers on bottom, and in the middle are snakeskins, ducks, a Kentucky warbler and a pheasant I shot.”

DUCK FEET

Since she was a girl, Daffin has helped out in her family-run Daffin’s Meat Processing that her grandfather started in his basement.

Daffin will be the first to admit she didn’t have the patience to finish the taxidermy process, but she is proud of her current, feathers photo series, because, “I got bored and skipped a few steps,” she said. “So, I cut up my pheasant, removed the head and photographed it. I think it’s a lot more interesting and pleasing if you don’t know what it is.”

Eliza Daffin

Daffin recently returned to Columbus from Colorado. She says that experience of being so far away from home made her realize how much her art is rooted in place.

“I had no relationship with its mountains, and big, blue skies,” she said. Daffin has pulled heavily from the influences of Sally Mann and Hale County artist William Christenberry, whose work, “shows you don’t have to go far to make meaningful art,” says Daffin. “This is all I want,” she said. “We may disconnect from our history, but eventually, the land wins, and we all die and, in that sense, a million parts add up, to one.”

You can find Eliza’s work now on display at the Heritage Arts Center, and Instagram.