Tim Davis, Quinto Quarto, 2013

The very first day I spent photographing Rome (it was the heat of September 2007), my assistant took me to Testaccio to show me the old slaughterhouse. The area was almost completely abandoned, inhabited by tramps and hungry dogs, and was beginning to succumb to gentrification, but it was not hard to imagine the guts flowing down the drains and the moans and moans of the beasts. The assistant, who was an astute musician as well as a chef, told me how Roman cuisine is defined as “Quinto Quarto”, a name that derives from the food that the slaughterhouse workers brought home, entirely made up of animal waste. As a naive American visiting a European capital for the first time, I was very impressed by the humility of this description, which reminded me of how this was a city of working people, and who dragged themselves among the fascinating layers of historical artifacts. I was also fascinated by how important the concept of “Quinto Quarto” was for my profession as a photographer, which has always been driven by my strong desire to look through current cultural iconography and to see what in theory I shouldn’t see. […]