ARTIST PROFILE // THE ULTIMATE GAME
Sacred Memories
Photographer Bruce Katsiff on life, death, and beauty
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
Bruce Katsiff was on the hunt for bones to photograph when he walked into the knackerman’s shop in West Philadelphia. A knackerman is somebody who collects dead animals, including roadkill or deceased farm stock. The carcasses are sometimes used to feed horses, pigs, or dogs, and the hides are used for tanning or other purposes—it’s been a time-honored job on farms. It was likely less regulated in an urban area in the ’80s, when Katsiff’s man was in a lot with signs warning that the meat and other wares he sold inside were not fit for human consumption.
“This guy is packing a six-shooter—a pistol on his belt, and it’s got a handle that’s broken, but there’s a rubber band around it. And he sells me, you know, some ram heads, some cow heads—these are things that still have flesh on them—and he puts them on the back of my car,” Katsiff tells me. After paying the knackerman and having a brief conversation about “beetling or boiling”—the two most tried-and-true methods of removing the rest of the flesh, the man told him, “If you get stopped by the cops—you didn’t get that here.
Katsiff went home and buried the heads.
“I’d basically put the stuff out in the field, build an encasement around them, and let them naturally decay. I remember on one occasion I did that, and it was at a friend’s house, and then they called me up screaming, ‘The wind has changed and we can smell your things!’” His photography students would sometimes bring a box filled with a dead mouse, or something else “terrible,” he laughs. He’s clearly still tickled by the mischief he caused in chasing his Nature Morte series, but he’s also pensive and self-aware about why he began hunting the photographs down in the first place. //
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