Untitled Garrafa presents absurd object portrait photography where subject wears red fire extinguisher on head, yellow industrial container in hand, patterned fabric costume standing in water—creating thing-human hybrid that appears extraterrestrial yet becomes familiar as "human too human" navigating hostile environment. Etem photographs with realist dignity: not posed aristocratic portrait but documentary capture of common person in daily survival, absurd industrial objects becoming normal costume within hostile-world context (swamp, water). Garrafa (container/bottle) suggests human reduced to thing yet maintaining dignity: being cosa (thing) in world hostile to humans requires absurd adaptations, industrial objects adorning body for contemporary survival.
 
This series of portraits that at first glance appear to us as extraterrestrial beings, once we understand the images they become more familiar than they appear, “humans too human” perhaps more human than they appear. And for Adorno's negative dialectic, the problem was given as a human being in a world hostile to humans, the characters of Etem seem so natural to us to the extent that their presence is outside the pose of the portraits of the kings of the past, rather resemble the workers, peasants, common people in general, portrayed by Gustave Courbet or the realists of the mid-19th century, these new realists are captured by the camera in the usual development of their daily lives, in the hostile world of the desert or the swamp or the storm…”
 
Absurd object portrait photography capturing thing-human dignity—industrial costume in hostile water environment. Untitled Garrafa from Ser Cosa by Rodrigo Etem. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.