Real Media correction (9th June): Apologies to Harvey we dropped a clanger as he is just 18, not 19 as in the original title and the remaining website URL.
We’re always happy to fix innaccuracies – thanks to Harvey for pointing this out.
A young photographer is slipping inside Britain’s factory farms at night. The images he’s bringing out are the ones the industry spends millions to prevent.
The call connected on a weekday afternoon, Harvey Giles answering from somewhere in England with the unhurried ease of a person whose mind is always half somewhere else – somewhere darker, louder, and more urgent than wherever his body happens to be. He is nineteen years old. He has already been inside places that most people will never see, carrying a camera, and he has come back changed.
Photography, he told me, is how he makes sense of things. The sense-making, in this case, involves entering industrial chicken sheds in the middle of the night, breathing through two masks against the ammonia, watching hundreds of birds, each an individual, stir and huddle in the dark, and then driving home to a world that has no idea. No idea of the scale or of the smell. No idea of what happens behind the treelines on the way to the supermarket.
His upcoming London exhibition – four diptychs and a short film – is not simply a photography show. It is an argument. It places images of chickens in industrial farms beside images of the same animals in sanctuaries, in roughly similar postures, in radically different worlds. One body crammed and dimly lit, another with access to sunlight, space, and the possibility of rest. The viewer is left to draw conclusions that the meat industry would rather they never reached.
A Nation of Chicken Eaters
The United Kingdom is one of the largest consumers of chicken in the world. Approximately one billion broiler chickens are slaughtered in Britain every year. 45 million day-old male chicks are killed by the egg industry annually because they cannot lay eggs and are not the breed used for meat. The chicken has become so ordinary a food product that it is almost invisible, wrapped in plastic, stripped of any identifying marker that might connect it to a living creature. This invisibility is not accidental.
Most UK chickens are raised under intensive broiler farming conditions. The Humane Society and various animal welfare organisations have documented the standard realities:
– birds bred to grow so rapidly that their legs frequently cannot support their own weight
– densities of up to nineteen birds per square metre in windowless sheds
– floors thick with accumulated waste
– lifespans of thirty-three to thirty-eight days before slaughter.
The industry standard is brief, crowded, and largely unseen.
Perhaps most troubling is what accreditation has come to mean. The RSPCA Assured label, carried on millions of British chicken products and widely understood by consumers as a meaningful welfare guarantee, has itself been subjected to sustained scrutiny. Investigative footage obtained by animal rights groups in recent years has shown conditions on RSPCA Assured farms that include large numbers of dead birds left among the living, severe leg deformities, and animals unable to reach food or water. And yet, bizarrely, as the footage accumulates, the Assured label persists. The gap between the promise on the packet and the reality inside the shed has never been wider.
The Weight of Witnessing
Giles grew up in a household that moved, one member at a time, towards veganism. His older brother was the initiator, watching documentaries, attending marches, and slowly converting the family. Giles became vegetarian at primary school age, vegan a few years later. His mother, father, and sister followed.
“We’ve always had rescue animals. Giant tortoises, small tortoises, rescue cats, rescue dogs. Even back then, we were rescuing animals.” Something in that instinct – the rescuing rather than the consuming – became the lens through which everything else was eventually understood.
Giles attended his first major animal rights march two weeks after going vegan, camera in hand. He had never really been to a protest. What he found was a scale of solidarity he hadn’t expected – thousands of people moving through a city, all gathered around the same refusal. It lit something in him, he said.
Photography, which had begun as a personal interest, became inseparable from the activism. He brought his camera to everything. He began shooting for PETA UK. Vegan organisations found him on Instagram and today he is regularly commissioned to capture and document the plight of our farmed animal cousins.
The Seed in Lisbon
His forthcoming project has its origins in a fish market in Portugal. Standing among the stalls, the ice, the bodies, the brisk transactional quiet of the place, Giles began photographing what he saw – the capture, the confinement, the commodification. Fish pulled from the sea and laid out under strip lighting, reduced to product. It was, he said, the same logic he had seen in every intensive farm he had ever visited. Different species, identical system.
Science has increasingly backed what advocates have long argued – fish are not the blank, unfeeling creatures that their treatment presupposes. Decades of comparative neurobiological research have established that teleost fish, the group that includes most commercially caught species, possess brain organisation far more complex than previously assumed. Their brains follow the same broad structural blueprint found across all vertebrates, with analogous pathways for sensory processing, emotional regulation, and pain. When subjected to noxious stimuli, fish exhibit behavioural and physiological responses consistent with aversive experience – escape behaviour, elevated stress hormones, altered movement and feeding. Crucially, these responses are reduced when fish are administered pain-relieving drugs – the same opioids and cannabinoids used to manage pain in mammals. The implication is difficult to avoid.
The Lisbon images did not become the exhibition. But they seeded it. They confirmed something Giles had been orbiting – that the camera, turned towards the right subject at the right moment, could make visible what the industry depends on keeping invisible.
Inside the Shed
The farm Giles visited was RSPCA Assured – that hollow marker. By industry standards, it was considered a better farm. He reached it through contacts who knew the locations of facilities that are deliberately difficult to find – not marked on maps, not visible from roads, set back and shielded in a way that reflects an industry well aware that its operations benefit from not being seen.
He described the entry to me in careful, unhurried detail. The door opening into pitch darkness. Working without light at first. The sudden, dizzying realisation of scale. The smell came through two masks. Ammonia, sharp and penetrating, making his eyes water. The constant mechanical hum of fans overhead. The floor covered in waste. Hundreds of birds in one shed, roosting in the dark, stirring at the intrusion of human presence – clustering together, huddling, some sitting on top of each other because there was no room to do otherwise. Some of the birds on the floor trying to get back to the roost, to the short-lived safety of elevation and proximity.
“You’ve got the sound of the fans, the smell, the waste on the floor. It’s all very industrial in there. The one thing that shocked me was the fact that it felt like it was never ending.”
Giles was inside for about an hour. When he left, there was a bright moon. He remembered noticing it, and the shock of light and open air after the sealed, ammonia-thick dark of the shed. And then, in the days that followed, the harder re-entry – walking into a supermarket, seeing the packaged bodies in the chilled aisle, knowing what he now knew, feeling the gap between his knowledge and everyone else’s as something almost physical.
“In a way, I did almost just want to scream and show people,” he said. “When you’re walking around in a supermarket, and you see people carrying the butchered bodies of chickens, of what were once individual living beings, all I could think about were the chickens I had met that night, and how they would be in a supermarket like this one day.”
Life extinguished, body in a trolley, or stuffed into a shopping basket.
The Ethics of the Image
There is a long philosophical tradition concerned with what photographs do to us, and what we do to subjects by photographing them. Susan Sontag, in her foundational essays on photography, argued that images of suffering create their own problems – they can numb as easily as they can awaken, turning atrocity into aesthetic experience, converting pain into something that can be consumed and set aside. The sheer accumulation of images of harm, she suggested, risks producing not outrage but a kind of compassion fatigue.
Jo-Anne McArthur, long-time advocate and photographer, whose influence on Giles’s project is explicit, has written and spoken extensively about this tension in the specific context of animals. In her view, developed over decades of work inside farms, slaughterhouses, and factory operations across the world, the photograph is not simply documentation. It is a moral act. To take an image is to insist that this being exists, that it suffers, that its suffering is real and not metaphorical, that it deserves to be looked at and not looked away from.
The diptych format Giles has chosen is philosophically precise in this respect. It does not ask the viewer simply to look at suffering. It asks the viewer to look at the same kind of creature in two radically different conditions, and then very subtly asks them to account for the difference. The question he poses is not merely what is happening here, but why we have decided it should happen at all.
There is also the question of what it means to photograph subjects who cannot consent to being photographed, who cannot understand the camera, cannot participate in any negotiation about how their image will be used. Giles’s side-by-side compositions attempt to open up space for the observed, to invite a sort of dialogue in which their presence is perhaps more active than in so much of animal photography.
Giles’s work is where documentary photography intersects with advocacy. His images do not merely report. They recruit. They create witnesses. And in a political and cultural landscape where the farming industry spends enormous resources ensuring that its operations remain invisible, from the physical positioning of sheds behind treelines to the legal mechanisms that in some countries criminalise the act of filming inside agricultural facilities, every image obtained is an act of resistance against that enforced blindness.
At the time of writing, Giles is in Birmingham, attending NARD Day, the National Animal Rights Day gathering that brings together activists, advocates, and organisations from across the UK. It is, in its way, the same world he entered the night he went to his first march with a camera he barely knew how to use. A world now bigger, more connected, and still, at its heart, a refusal to look away.
Readers who want to follow Giles’s work, and find out more about his upcoming exhibition, can do so on his Instagram account.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
