Henry Hargreaves
No Seconds
Fàbrica Cal Garbat
The tradition of the last meal straddles a contradiction: in the most unnatural of circumstances – death sanctioned by the state – a person is offered a profoundly ordinary comfort: a plate of food, a final, modest gesture of humanity in the face of the irreversible.
This series examines the death penalty in the United States through the lens of this ritual, viewed from New Zealand, where capital punishment is almost a relic of a bygone era.
By reading the meal requests, those sentenced to death cease to be mere statistics or villains and become individuals, briefly humanised through something intimate and shared, which raises the question of whether empathy can emerge even from places designed to deny it.
Henry Hargreaves (New Zealand, 1979) is a photographer and food artist based in New York. His work explores the stories, rituals and habits we construct around food. Always with a playful, cheeky, nostalgic and colourful tone.
His work has been exhibited all over the world, from the Venice Biennale and Art Basel to his grandmother’s care home.
