Exhibit Weaves Together The Beauty And The Horror

Dried fish like graceful plant life. A chunk of gray liver that looks like a ​“silver ingot,” as a visitor to the exhibit put it. A photo that captures the energy and the sadness of an overcrowded pen of fish. With ​“Thinking Twice” — on view now through Dec. 27 at City Gallery on Upper State Street — artist Phyllis Crowley asks us to both appreciate the fascinating forms that nature creates, and examine our own relationship to it, particularly in how we eat.

“This series originated with trips to markets in Mexico, France and Spain, where I saw meat and fish cut and displayed in a manner which I had never seen before,” Crowley writes in an accompanying statement. ​“I was immediately captivated by the visual possibilities, combined with observations about the cultural differences and the treatment of living creatures.

“In the 10 years since then, I have visited many more markets abroad, including the Far East. Sheets of meat backlit, fish or crabs wrapped around each other, making beautiful dezigns, often glistening in luscious colors under special lights are inviting to the photographer. Many of the paintings look like landscapes.

“At the same time that I saw aesthetic possibilities in these subjects, I was also aware of other things. Many of these market displays have repugnant associations in our culture. We are now much more aware of the suffering of even the simplest living creatures, who are routinely crammed into small containers awaiting a buyer.

“As a human being as well as a photographer,” she concludes, ​“I feel a responsibility to these issues.”

So it is with a pan full of live eels she found in a fish market. The eels were covered in a net to prevent their escape, but ​“you can see the eyes” if you look carefully, Crowley said. ​“When I saw the net, I saw something that was fascinating visually,” she said, describing the photographic eye she brought to bear. In the hole in the net, ​“there was an emphasis, a center of attention.” The net almost functioned like a veil, an ​“interference between the subject and the photographer.”

At the same time, she said, ​“I was very aware of what was underneath.” The eels were ​“mashed in all together,” with just enough water to keep them alive. For Crowley, it was beautiful and horrible at the same time.

In a show of earlier photographs in the series a few years ago, Crowley said she had included more visceral pictures of meat and poultry, which created visceral reactions. When they looked at a picture of a ham, ​“some people thought it was a cinnamon bun,” Crowley said. When Crowley told them it was a ham, they recoiled. ​“I can’t look at it,” she recalled them saying. ​“I was a little surprised at the strength of the feedback,” she said.

She hoped to be able to show audiences the balance — admiration for the natural forms, and acceptance of our responsibilities to them. ​“Ten years ago,” she said, she also ​“wasn’t so sensitive to the feelings of some of these fish.” In Tristesse, one of the fish up for sale in the bin still has a hook in its mouth. She recalled one viewer of that image, a fisherman, tell someone else that the fish can’t feel it. This is something fishermen have said everywhere, though recent studies suggest it’s not true, and scientific experiments that involve fish are now conducted with the understanding that they must be treated humanely. Crowley also wants to draw attention to the conditions the fish are kept under in fish markets. ​“The way they’re crammed together,” she said, has a touch of cruelty to it, and ​“life isn’t going to get any better” for them. And that isn’t scratching the surface of the lives of animals in factory farms.

For some people, the above is part of the logic for becoming vegetarian (though what happens as we learn ever more about the lives of plants as well?). But Crowley is still omnivorous.

“Food is such an important part of our lives,” she said. ​“I love food and I love to cook, and I love to go to the market. I’m fascinated by all the different things that people eat.” And, she noted, eating animals doesn’t against the natural order of things, in which animals constantly eat other animals. ​“Fish eat other fish,” she said. Rather, she said, she moves increasingly toward the culinary wisdom of cultures the world over that suggest that we should respect animals even as we eat them: let them live humane lives, kill them quickly, and use all of the animal.

And Crowley returns to the sheer beauty of the forms. ​“Yes, I know what it is,” she said. ​“But the colors and the shapes are really beautiful — beautiful to look at.” Maybe, she added, ​“the beauty increases the feeling of horror.” Diving into those tangled questions about aesthetics and ethics, and wrestling with the fact that there are no easy answers — questions that reach their most fevered pitch for photographers documenting wars, famines, and other atrocities — is the road that photographers take in some way or another. Understanding more about how thought and perception worked together in one’s own mind was part of the equation, too. Quoting photographer Frederick Sommer, Crowley said, ​“you can’t see what you don’t know.”

“Thinking Twice” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Dec. 27. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.