These Chickens Lay Designer Eggs for Big Pharma

Photographer Daniel Szalai uncovers the intensely regulated production of premier eggs used to develop new vaccines.

What came first: the chicken or the genetically engineered egg? In Novogen, Budapest-based photographer Daniel Szalai explores the fraught relationship between tech and nature as humans thirst for mastery over the world around us. The series investigates the production of high-quality, disease-free eggs made in extremely controlled environments by the Novogen company in France. No iota of life is left unregulated for these animals. Novogen layers are genetically manipulated to develop a unique digestive tract that is able to keep up with a fast increase in consumption until they reach an ideal body weight. Each prototype bird is inserted with an electronic chip that serves live data for insight into the animal's genetic potential. Egg shells are monitored for color and thickness. Think Handmaid's Tale, Poultry Edition.

Precious as they are, the chickens have an expiration date. Novogen Whites are killed when no longer able to produce high-quality eggs, a Darwinian fate encouraged by the pragmatism of high-volume production. But their pain is our gain: the eggs are sold to pharmaceutical companies for developing new medicines and vaccines.

Szalai's photographs are an inside look at a Hungarian farm that produces and retails the eggs. Szalai had to apply for entry to the facility twice before receiving approval. And even upon entry, there were stringent stipulations. Szalai was asked to wear a "white space suit" and gloves at the farm, and his Nikon D800 DSLR and photo equipment underwent a thorough sterilization process.

Szalai, a student at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, intended Novogen for entry to the 2018 BreadaPhoto Festival (the theme was "To Infinity and Beyond"). He shot the series in two parts. The first was a collection of 168 portraits of the Novogen egg-laying chickens. Szalai set up shop in the 100-meter-long chicken shed and built a small podium with a blue backdrop, envisioning an employee-style grid. "I wanted to portray the chickens as workers in the industry," Szalai explains. While taking portraits of this nature came with many technical considerations, casting was not difficult. Szalai noticed some of the chickens jockeyed for the camera multiple times. This observation surprised Szalai—after all, the photographer was the first human the chickens had seen enter their sterile world. By the end of the shoot, Szalai had spent six days in the chicken shed and took more than 7,000 images. He also couldn't bring himself to eat chicken for the next three weeks.

The next part of Novogen was a series of photographs of the facility and the phases of vaccine production. Szalai's approach here was like that of an investigative journalist, visiting the Hungarian campus about four to five times to document the environment in which the chickens lived. "I really saw how they were being held, in pure clinical environments," Szalai says. "All aspects of their lives are transferred into numbers. They're really unnatural, man-made creatures." As a final touch to Novogen, Szalai included the factory's marketing materials and management guide. The two sets of documents appear as foils: The cheery optimism of the Novogen branding barely masking the onerous language relating to calcium consumption for ideal egg shell quality.

Szalai himself also often felt at odds, struggling to reconcile the oppressive environment in which Novogens are produced with the fact that these animals save lives. Human lives, that is. "We need these chickens as biological carriers of our technology," Szalai says. "We can now make crazy things and develop them very far. But what about living cells? How do you manage or manipulate those?"

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