When Jonathan Blaustein bought 10 early-season organic blueberries for $1, he was a little upset by the price tag.
It wasn’t the visual contrast — one dime to one blueberry — that perturbed him. It was the fact that six weeks earlier, he had purchased 17 organic blueberries from Chile for the same price.
“The blueberries from Chile were almost half the cost of the blueberries from 800 miles away,” said Mr. Blaustein, a cook-turned-photographer who arranged the berries in two neat rows of five and photographed them, in all of their organic goodness.
He did the same thing with seven packages of shrimp-flavored ramen noodles, 48 tea biscuits from Spain, a little pile of rice.
It was a cheeseburger that initially encouraged Mr. Blaustein, 36, to pursue his project, “The Value of a Dollar.” When the economy was in the midst of its downward spiral, he visited a fast-food chain in New Mexico, where he lives.
“On one menu they had a cheeseburger for a dollar,” he said. What caught his eye, though, was another menu, which featured a double cheeseburger for the same price. That additional piece of meat, and the extra slice of cheese, somehow didn’t change the price.
So he set out to see what he could buy for one dollar in New Mexico. Then he turned the techniques used in advertising on their head, showcasing food in its most realistic form.
“I thought, ‘Well, I know what they tell me it looks like,’ ” he said. ‘What about what it actually looks like?’ ”
