Tamara Staples is a photographer that combines her love of art and cock into picture books. In this episode, Tamara talks about her love for cocks, and how she got that interest in the first place. The show also helps answer questions like “how do you tame a cock for photography?” and “why did you start cock photography?”
Tamara Staples’ work has appeared in such publications as Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times , New York Magazine, Town and Country, National Geographic and was featured on NPR’s This American Life and CNN. She’s a fellow of the Rauschenberg Residency (2015) and a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant.
Her in-depth investigation of Pure-Bred Poultry led to the publication of The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens and The Magnificent Chicken: Portraits of the Fairest Fowl .
Other links mentioned by Tamara Staples:
- The Giant Chicken Video
- Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens
- The Magnificent Chicken: Portraits of the Fairest Fowl
ADRIENNE HEW: Aloha, and welcome to the Nutrition Heretic podcast. This is Adrienne Hew, the Nutrition Heretic coming from sunny Waimea in Hawai’i. We’re coming up on Christmas, guys, and you know what that means; it’s time to get your copy of 50 Ways to Eat Cock. This is my season y’all, this is when people decide that it’s the perfect, perfect time to enjoy a little cock during the holidays. I have found from my Amazon reviews that more than anything, this book seems to do really well, although after the #MeToo movement this could change, but it seems to do really well at office parties, Christmas grab bags and things like that, so just keep it in mind.
As you guys know, when I wrote the book I didn’t actually own any chickens. Now I do and my neighbors, well I live in a neighborhood now and to keep the neighborhood quiet I had to get rid of my cock; I had to let him go. It was sad because we really liked him, we called him Black Beauty; he was really pretty. He was a wild cock and I think that these wild Hawai’ian chickens are descended from some English, I forgot what the breed was called, but they look a lot like some British old breeds that I think went wild when they got here.
That brings me today’s guest heretic, Tamara Staples, she’s the photographer for The Fairest Fowl, as well as another book called, The Magnificent Chicken. Welcome to the show, Tamara. I keep wanting to call you “Ta-mar-a” like the tamari. But you’re Tamara, like camera.
TAMARA STAPLES: Tamara like camera. Thank you so much for having me today, I appreciate it.
What Got Tamara so Interested in Cocks?
AH: Tell me, what got you so interested in fowl, in cocks?
TS: Well, I came to falling in love with the cock because my favorite uncle is a breeder of chickens and he invited me to go to a poultry show many, many years ago. I’d never been before; I knew he had chickens in his backyard and they were pure-bred. Of course, that was all I knew when I went to the poultry show. I walked into the room and there was this gigantic room, of I don’t know, of five hundred different types and breeds of chickens and I was mesmerized by the variety, the shapes, the colors, the sizes, and it was love at first sight. I was blown away by what I was seeing. I mean I didn’t really know much about the chicken, that anyone even knew about, all these different, this outlet of show poultry, basically. Have you heard?
AH: No, I was going to say I hadn’t really contemplated poultry shows. I knew about places where you could, like markets down in the Bronx where you could buy live chicken to have them slaughtered right there for you, early ’60s or ’70s, but I was unaware of the poultry show, like the dog show or the goat, a 4-H kind of thing.
The Fascination With American Poultry Shows
TS: It’s fascinating. Most people, I think either they see them at the fairs that they go to in the summer, that’s basically what they know, but actually there’s quite a web of poultry shows all over the country, and many other countries, as well. They’re very popular in Australia, for instance, England and France. It’s just this interesting sub-culture of people who pick their favorite breeds of chickens and they spend their lives in the pursuit in creating the perfect specimen through breeding.
What Qualities Are Chickens Being Bred For?
AH: How much are chickens being bred today and for what qualities are we looking for, that hasn’t already been done? Hopefully before Christmas I’ll have my coloring book out, but I’m looking at people who are talking about their Australorps and Orpingtons, these heritage breeds. What are some of the newer breeds being bred for?
TS: Well, there’s a variety of breeds that happen. Now, when most of the people are breeding to the Standard of Perfection, which is a book that’s been in publication for, I don’t know, two hundred years, maybe a hundred years ago, when people, they would have shows at Madison Square Garden where the gentleman farmer would come and they would show their birds.
These breeds are very old; they’re from all over the world and then the newer breeds generally are mixes of two birds. One of my favorites is called The Showgirl, which is actually either cocks or hens, I know, right, but it’s a combination of a silkie and a naked neck. It’s a bizarre looking thing, but this is the thing about these new breeds that are accepted into the Standard of Perfection. There has to be a certain amount of people that are breeding them, they have to be over a certain amount of years that have been bred, and they have to be shown within the system of the poultry shows a certain amount of times. It can take, I don’t know, ten years to have one of the birds admitted to the Standard of Perfection. They’re very picky and they want to make sure that they keep them perfect, if you will.
AH: Right, right. That almost sounds like getting a new word put into the Oxford Dictionary. It has to be in used for a certain amount of time, to make it to social media, that kind of thing.
TS: Yes. There was a time when the Poultry Association that made our food and this association were closely linked. I think all of that’s gone out of fashion now since hormones are used to make the chickens grow really fast, like larger breasts. These people who are raising these chickens for show would keep them at a standard so there was always stock to choose from, like the heavy meat producers and the heavy egg layers. Those were the practical reasons that people were keeping them, but also just the showmanship of the birds, and the beauty of the feathers and so forth.
AH: So, for you as photographer, what do you prefer? Is it the hen or the cock? I’m serious, because we know that the cock, and pretty much as far as I know, every bird it’s the male that has the prettier feathers.
TS: It’s true. When I began this project I think what surprised me about the chickens was; they were beautiful of course, but I set out to create and to capture, I wanted to capture the personality of the bird. When I photograph them I’m really looking for the bird to give me something; to strut its stuff or to show me a side of it that I wasn’t expecting.
It would be great, also, if the bird has perfect feathers and a big red comb. But there are all kinds of birds there, some of them are a little bit beat up; maybe they’re molting, or maybe they’re not all enough, or what have you, but I found the cocks are more beautiful because their plumages are more exaggerated. I’ve gotten gorgeous shots of the hens because they’re just more, maybe, you know, have a better personality.
Chickens With Personality
AH: Right, because cocks, they’re aptly named sometimes; they can be dicks.
TS: Yes, that’s so true, but also it’s about age. It’s interesting that I’ve met a lot of cocks and hens now. Their personalities are really different and just like dogs, certain breeds are known for certain personalities; some are more high strung and some are very docile.
And then of course with age, if you photograph a pullet, which is a chicken under a year, they may be even more so if they’re in their teenage years. For instance, you may not even be able to keep them on the background because they’re flighty and crazy, wild-eyed.
Older birds, they’re just going to stand, they stand in front on the background and they look right into the camera; that’s the thing that I never got used to. Even though my camera was ten feet away, when I get home and I looked at the images, their eye is focused right on the lens of the camera. It’s always so surprising to me.
AH: They were probably trying to figure out whether or not they could eat it. Can that fit in my beak? There’s this one hen who won’t go back in the coop at night and I know she’s going to get eaten by a mongoose sooner or later. But she keeps eating, in the morning we put out the cat’s food, and she just goes, if the cats are not around she’ll eat all of their food and the cats get nothing. She just does not want to go, and it’s not like we don’t have plenty of stuff for her to eat. We have an acre of land, but she always goes for the cat food; she goes for easy.
TS: Oh wow. What kind of breed is she?
AH: She’s some kind of wild chicken. There are so many wild chickens in Hawai’i.
TS: I was wondering about that because I know Key West; they’re notorious for having wild chickens.
AH: Yes, they’re pretty much considered a pest here. To that point, even though we have mongoose which actively attack chickens. They just kill them for the heck of it, they don’t even eat them, they just kill them and then leave them for you to discover the next day. Pesky little things.
TS: Oh, wow. Have you lost some of your chickens to mongoose?
AH: Ironically, no. In our last house we had neighbors whose dogs always seem to find their way into our yard and kill our chickens; since we moved here so far so good. We haven’t had anything and we have two cats so they probably keep the mongoose under control. Actually, there’s a bunch of stray cats, too, that don’t bother the chickens either, but they probably also help with rats and mongoose.
TS: Wow, it’s wild out there.
AH: Seriously. It’s a little bit Wild West here; sometimes people go, “Yeah, everything goes in Hawai’i.”
TS: I live in Brooklyn and I live across the street from a cemetery. Sometimes there’ll be ten or fifteen raccoons going through our garbage. It can be wild in the middle of the city, too.
AH: Yeah. No, I’m familiar with New York and Brooklyn, although I’ve never lived in Brooklyn, but I’m familiar with some of the wild life that can survive. I hear that there are some coyotes, too, right?
TS: I’ve not seen any coyotes.
AH: You don’t see them, but I hear they’re around. They seem to flock, just kind of living on the verge of cities now all over the country.
TS: Poor guys.
Some of the Most Beautiful Cocks Around
AH: You said your favorite cock, or chicken, was the silkie mix with the bare necked…
TS: No, that’s one of the new ones; I think that’s a really cool and interesting bird. There are so many, people’s favorites, I can’t tell you that I have a favorite one because I do have a lot of them but I like the Polish. They have that shock of hair that comes out of the top of their heads.
AH: Yes, the one that looks like Rod Stewart, that one?
TS: Yes. And then on top of that I think it’s so interesting, I guess it’s a gene. I’ve never dabbled in chicken breeding but it’s called a Frizzle. If you breed a Frizzle with another bird, any kind of bird that you have, the feathers will grow from back to front so they’re all curly. And that’s its own thing; a Frizzled Polish is a really interesting bird.
AH: Right.
TS: Then there’s the really beautiful Sebrights. Their lace, every single feather is tipped in a different color; it looks like it’s actually sewn on or something, it’s just absolutely beautiful. Then one of my favorite birds is called a Cochin, it’s very popular; you probably know what that is.
AH: Yes, I do. I believe I do. Definitely I’ve heard of them. I’m trying to picture one right now.
TS: Their backside is really full. This is a great story. Queen Victoria was gifted a Cochin, and whenever, eighteen whenever she was in power, it became from a Chinese Emperor. It’s a Chinese bird and it took England by storm so much so that people stopped breeding all other birds.
AH: Oh, wow.
TS: It was that exciting. And if you think about it, during that time was when the bustle came into fashion.
AH: Right.
TS: And I’m absolutely sure, I’ve not read anything about it but if you look at a Cochin, their backside is almost as high as their head. It’s all feathers, you don’t see their feet, it’s just like one block of feathers and their butts are big and round.
AH: That totally makes sense.
TS: Isn’t that hilarious.
AH: It absolutely makes sense because we do know that throughout the world, especially when we look at some of the native tribes if you want to call, from Papua New Guinea or wherever. A lot of these, a lot of times the males in many of these cultures will paint themselves to mimic birds.
TS: Wow, yes.
AH: So it’s not a far leap, especially in an age before the internet and all the distractions that we have now, for people to have mimicked a bird in fashion. You know there’s still probably a lot of fashion that we just don’t even, shoes and all kinds of things.
TS: Well, you know in England also, again back to England because they’re big on their bird stuff; the hats that women wear.
AH: Yes. Well, the Audubon Society kind of stuff.
TS: Yes, another one of my favorite birds is the Modern Game. They’re super skinny, they’re very tall, and they have very tall legs. They were originally, the Modern Game, they were bred for fighting because they’re tall and skinny and they do something called dubbing, which is so sad to me, but they cut off their combs. They have a clean head and they cut off their waddles as well. They don’t even look like a chicken.
AH: Right.
TS: They just have super tall legs and they have a super long neck. They did this because they didn’t want the birds to bleed, basically, when they’re fighting. But they’re such beautiful, elegant, and weird; they look like dinosaurs.
AH: Is that the big thing that looks like big bird? And they have the video, it walks out of the…it looks like a person in a bird suit.
TS: It’s not fluffy. It’s not fluffy. The birds, the feathers are very close to the bird itself and it doesn’t have any feathers. It’s not feather-legged so it has clean feet. They’re very, just elegant.
AH: About how big are we talking? When you say big, tall…
TS: A foot.
AH: The one I’m talking about is like human size.
TS: Oh my goodness, I’ve not seen that.
AH: You haven’t seen that? Girl, I need to show you.
TS: I know, you really do. Can you eat it?
AH: I don’t know about that. I’d be afraid to stick that one in my mouth.
TS: There is a cock. Oh my gosh.
AH: It’s disturbingly large and it doesn’t even look like an animal. It literally looks like somebody in their Halloween costume.
TS: Good grief. In what part of the world is it?
AH: I have no idea; somebody sent me the video. There’s a couple of videos floating around, I will share it with you.
TS: You really need to. I want to see that.
AH: It’s wild.
How Do Chickens and Art Intertwine? Aka: I’ve Eaten Your People
I’m not sure I even need to ask you what my next question was, which is how do chickens and art intertwine? I think you’re rare in the sense that I think most people would go, “Oh, I’m a photographer; I’m too good to take pictures of chickens. I have to take some other kind of pictures, or at least a chicken when it’s cooked or something like that.” Where do you see the two come together? What do they do have in common?
TS: Well, I guess they’re beautiful and I love the idea of creating a portrait from animals. Now, animal photography is nothing new; William Wegman took it to the extreme level. He’s one of the most famous art photographers known. He uses Weimaraners and they became super famous. He’s done everything with them; they’re in museums.
I guess I’ve always just been attracted to whatever I’m attracted to. I’m an artist so that’s where that intersection happens. When I first began photographing the birds people made fun of them. They’re like, “Oh, that’s so silly. Chickens; they’re things you eat.” But over time the people who got it saw the humanity.
For me, maybe the most profound part of photographing these chickens is that we eat them. We eat them and here they are, and this amazing network of people lifting them up and showing their beauty. When I would take one of these gorgeous creatures and put it on my backdrop and light it, and work with it to get it to like to give me some kind of emotion, or whatever you do when you’ are shooting a portrait, all I could think about is, “I’ve eaten your people.” And you’re standing on…yes, seriously…
AH: I hear you. I hear you. I have goats, seriously, I understand it.
TS: I’ve eaten your people and you’re standing on my background giving me your everything. It humbled me, it really humbled me. Then the rest is when people see them and they’re like…One of my favorite stories is someone emailed me and she’s like, “I love to get drunk with my girlfriends and we go through your book and we talk about which chicken we would have sex with.”
They see these as people; they see the personality. They get it, you know. They get that this one is macho and this one is shy and this one is sexy. They’re really giving you the full spectrum of personality. I’m not a vegetarian; in fact, they serve chicken at the poultry shows.
AH: Oh, but the poultry shows, those are not necessarily eaten chickens, right? Those are show chickens?
TS: They’re all edible.
AH: They’re edible technically.
TS: Do you want to eat a chicken? I mean, I did a CSA for many years and our farmer decided to introduce chickens. I was like, that’s great, we would love to eat chickens from your farm. We got them and they were, they run around freely all day long eating whatever they want and they were the worst cooking chickens I’d ever eaten. Their flesh was hard.
How 50 Ways to Eat Cock Was Born
AH: Well, that’s why I wrote the book. Honestly, that’s why I wrote the book because my friend, she got the birds from the hatchery as chicks and they were like, at least half them will be hens. Every last one of the fifty was a dude. Every single one of them was a rooster.
TS: Wow.
AH: So she’s like, “Adrienne, I don’t know what to do with these. They’re tough, stringy, and dry. I was like, give me a crack at it.
TS: So, you figured out how to…I’m curious. Tell me.
AH: Steam; low, slow, water; you don’t want to roast them. You don’t want to fry them unless they are very young. You don’t want to cook them with that kind of direct heat; it’s all about the slow and the low. Now, if it’s an older one it might take a couple of days to get them to lighten up, to be palatable, but for the most part I’ve found out that the average cock or older laying hen will take about an hour and a half. You can steam them. You can, you know Chinese style. You can, any kind of stew. So think of Moroccan tagines. You can even do a paella if you time it right.
You can do really any kind of old fashioned, actually the first, when my friend told me this the first thing that came to my mind was coq au vin, which is we would cook this cock, in French it’s stewed in wine. The cock-a-leekie in Scotland is pretty popular; most people know about that. It’s just cooked down; it’s like a soup, basically.
In Jamaica, which is my family background, cock soup, every Jamaican will tell you about. Every Jamaican has a cock soup story, I have no idea why but they all have one; they all have something about it. I tend to talk over myself, I apologize.
Throughout the animal kingdom, in the farming scenario, the males are always expendable. If you have more than two cocks in a space they will fight each other, unless they have unlimited numbers of hens to choose from. They will fight; they’ll beat the stuffing out of each other. For every fifteen hens you got to have one cock because anybody else, and they’ll fight to the death. They don’t care if they are brothers, they will really go after each other.
It’s the same thing with bulls and bears and any other kind of animal; they just fight, the males always fight when you have them in a farming situation. I’m borrowing a buck right now to breed my doe and I have to keep him separate from her son because he will kill him. Thinking that even though he is a wether, the son is a wether so he has no balls. But, he will kill him because he knows that he could. In theory he is his competition.
TS: Right, yes.
AH: So, anyway I just sent you here, through Skype, the giant chicken video if you want to watch that and give us your reaction.
TS: Okay, I’m looking at it. Oh, good grief. Oh my gosh.
AH: It’s a little frightening, isn’t it?
TS: Oh, he’s in Russia. Of course, he’s in Russia.
AH: Yes, right. And I’ve seen other videos with birds, totally different videos with birds that size.
TS: That’s a Brahma.
AH: Is that? Oh, that’s right. I did see, I did look that up at one point, now you’re reminding me.
TS: Holy cow. That is the biggest…
AH: It doesn’t even look a bird, it looks like somebody in an outfit.
TS: I wonder what…
AH: Like some kind of Chernobyl chicken.
TS: That’s insane, that is absolutely insane. Oh my gosh. Yes, that’s definitely a Brahma. Beautiful.
AH: Can you imagine if you got the one in the studio? Would you…
TS: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness, I couldn’t get it up on the background. It would be…
AH: You would have to build a new set for that chicken.
TS: Yes, I really would. I did photograph some chickens while I was at the poultry shows and they’re pretty big, but that’s an incredible chicken. Oh my goodness.
How to Tame a bird for Cock Photography
AH: So, how do you tame a cock like that for photographing purposes? Like when you want to photograph, because mine are totally wild; they would never let me. Mama hen would never let me near the babies, when they were babies, they chase me down for food but they won’t let me handle them. How do you…go on.
TS: It’s different when these birds are handled a lot from very early. Some of these people, in the spring they’ll hatch out maybe two hundred birds and then they’ll cull, is what they call, they kill off the ones that aren’t going to be used. Or they’ll just save them and eat them.
So they’re constantly handled; they’re picked up, they’re looked at, their feather size. They’re looking at their feet to make sure that their feet look good, that their head isn’t…they have to be perfect. Probably one of them is getting handled every single day or more so that is why they are a little bit, and they actually work with them to pose. When they’re on my set they have a long little stick that they can touch the beak and it will hold its head up more. Just tap the back side and it will hold its butt up a little bit more. Some birds, like the silkie for instance, they can’t see. The silkies are the ones that have, they look…
AH: The lamp shape head.
TS: Yes, they’re covered, their feathers actually have less barbs than any other birds, they look have they have fur. They’re from China and they’re a delicacy, they have all dark skin and dark meat. You see them hanging in Chinatown, I’m sure.
AH: Yes.
TS: Those poor things, they can’t see at all. You put them on the background and they will just, their heads will go straight to the ground. So what the owner will do, there are lots of different techniques. Like grab its back end and shake it, and it will like sit up a little bit.
Sometimes when a bird is tired, you have to remember that these birds, they have travelled, they’ve been put in a cage, they get stuck in a truck. They drive, I don’t know, depending on how far they come, for some it could be an hour. It could be two hours, it could be four hours, and some people will drive across the country to go to these poultry shows.
So they’ve been in a truck and they get put on a long table with thousands of other birds. They’re spending the night next to a bird they’ve never even met, right? And then they get pulled out and handled by the judge to look at its feathers and feet and head. Like the shapes, it gets measured and all, and weighed and all kinds of stuff.
Then after it’s been manipulated in all these kinds of ways and it’s in a weird place, they bring it over to my set and stick down the background. So the bird is like, what the heck? You got to think about what this bird has been through. I always feel so bad for it.
There’s a variety of ways in which to get the bird, one is with the stick to get it to stand up a certain way. Or sometimes I’ll go over and pick the bird up and just rub its head and look at it and talk to it and I’ll put it back. I don’t handle it too much because if I break a feather I don’t want to be blamed for that.
How Amorous Chickens Behave
There are other ways, like turning the bird upside down and letting it flap its wings to get the energy out and putting it back up. Or another great trick that works, and it works across all species, is to go and get the opposite sex of a bird that that bird does not know and bring it over to the set and wave it in its face. If it’s a male, particularly, it will perk right up. It will start to show itself; like shoulders back, head up high, strutting around. And it works on females too, I’ve seen it both ways, and that’s a wonderful little trick to get the bird to pose.
AH: You just reminded me of something that surprised me when I had my roosters and the hens. As a novice you notice any difference, but when you look at the stance, the positioning of the wings, and the kind of personalities, like you said, even just visually there is more beyond the comb right, because the females can have a comb and waddle. They stand totally differently. The males, they almost look like they’re wearing little tuxedos. They put their arms down, their wings down to their sides. Whereas the females push back more towards the rear. I found that really fascinating, that there was even that difference between the male and the female. And that it’s not, you know when you talked about him standing more erect, and getting, like showing some interest basically all of a sudden in what’ is going on. That really kind of brought back that image.
TS: And that’s crazy that it just works across all species.
AH: It really is fascinating. I was talking about the goat, and our goat, when the buck came in, actually the buck makes this hilarious “getting’ it on” face.
TS: I would like to see that face.
AH: It’s on my Facebook page.
TS: I have to look at it.
AH: He curls his upper lip when, like he’ll sniff around her rear area, and he’ll flip his upper lip and smile.
TS: And how does the female take it?
AH: Depends if she really wants anything to do with him.
TS: Right.
AH: When she first met him he was trying to get close to her and she just kept standing up on her hind legs, as if to say, “Get away from me, I’m bigger than you.“
TS: My gosh.
AH: After a while they started to buddy up and then she went into heat. Then the two of them were just kind of nuzzling up to one another, it was really cute. She’s not in heat anymore so she’s like, get me away from this guy. Get me away from him.
TS: Is it like a violent weird thing? I can’t imagine two goats having sex.
AH: You know what, I’ve never been actually been there for it, to be honest. But his little pink torpedo kind of made an appearance and it wasn’t pretty.
TS: Well, when chickens, this is the thing, I’ve seen many chickens have sex.
AH: They’re pretty reapy.
TS: Very, very…I’m sorry?
AH: They’re reapy, the roosters.
TS: It is and it’s very fast. It’s that coitus kiss, which is bizarre to me. It’s like they have this one hole that’s for everything.
AH: Yes.
TS: It’s really bizarre.
AH: It’s so true, and the male, they’ll bite the hen on the head and hold it down and she’s like get off of me. And he’s like, okay, I’m done, go.
TS: Yes, exactly. I’m done with you, next.
AH: Exactly. And it’s kind of funny to watch them in the wild like that, too. We used to live behind a brew house and they always have barrels of grain out there. There would be this mama hen with her chicks and this rooster would show up all the time and chase her. She would try to find the highest tree she could find just to get away from him. She was like, “Leave me alone. I’m teaching my kids. I’m teaching my kids how to forage for food. Now just leave us the heck alone.”
TS: Maybe someone needs share with him about the #MeToo Movement.
AH: Yeah.
You may also enjoy The Magnificent Chicken: An Interview With Tamara Staples.
If you’ve enjoyed this show, please Pin or share on social media!
