Roadkill Photography - A Manifesto

Driving = job = money = food & shelter. Without food & shelter we would die.

The short equation is: Driving = Life and its counterpart,

Not Driving = Death.

This brings the idea of value to the fore – is the life of a common housecat more valuable than the life of an elk? Since we are more closely connected to domesticated animals like cats and dogs, do we place greater value on their lives?Why is the life of a deer less valued than the life of Cecil the lion (http://cecilthelion.org/)? We assign value... See more

I wonder if people are better able to accept the death of an animal if it appears peaceful, versus one that has suffered a tragic, blood-spattered demise? I wonder if the people that react most violently to Joy’s work are those steeped in the denial of their own mortality?

“In the end, people seem to be afraid to think of their bodies as merely temporary arrangements of atoms which house an eternal life-force. They are attached to their limited, constructed ways of thinking, and any change scares them. For this reason, my work is often not well-received.”

So many people drive each day in order to "avoid death" that there are traffic jams and accidents. They are willing to play the odds of taking the life of an animal, a human, or even themselves, in order to try to circumvent a more probable demise, given the above equation.

What this boils down to is that those people are willing to swap the (perce... See more