In 2014, Food & Water Watch was campaigning against the use of low-dose antibiotics in factory farm animal feed. Evidence shows that long-term use of these low-dose antibiotics affect the environment in and around factory farms, where bacteria encountering the non-lethal dosages of antibiotics grow immune — becoming “superbugs” — thereby making them more difficult to treat as infections in other animals and in humans. Food & Water Watch’s awareness campaign, titled “Factory Farms Make Me Sick,” centered around the fact that many people fall victim every year to “superbug” infections that do not respond to traditional treatments, and eventually require stronger interventions such as full-spectrum antibiotics at much longer courses of treatment. Some of these infections even become fatal.
I created a series of social media images for this campaign that ran over the course of several weeks. The visual theme included high-contrast, black and white photography to underscore the severe nature of the issue, while keeping the campaign logo in full color for campaign recognition.
An opportunity to run a campaign advertisement in New York’s Times Square arose, and the visuals were repurposed to educate the public about the many health and community hazards created by factory farming, not only locally but nationwide.
I provided the art direction and master files for the following animation, which ran in Times Square for 24 hours.
Photographs by Jon Simon:
