"This is not a drug" is a set of images that plays with the concepts of time, repetition, story, appropriation, identity, and reality. The concept appropriates the painting entitled "this is not a pipe" by René François Ghislain Magritte which sets up a conversation about what defines reality. These photographs tell a story of a man being consumed by his own habit. The cigarette or drug that the first photograph depicts is not real because the viewer is merely looking at a photograph of a cigarette not an actual cigarette. In the second and third images the man inhales the drug that the first photograph states not to be real. The fact that the flame touches the edge of the photograph foreshadows the event to come. In the fourth image the man literally begins to inhale himself depicted by his own photograph being set on fire by his own habit. Since the man and the photographer are one in the same does the man's self destruction also create the destruction of his art?
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