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?”

Mr. Blaustein painted the walls of his apartment white and used what he had at his disposal — a sharp lens and a shallow depth of field — to create the same illusions used in the ad industry. Rather than setting up a tripod and shooting every image the same way, he got personal with his food. He wanted to represent it as it really is.

“We’re all bombarded with images in the mass media, and these images are not true representations of the food item itself,” Mr. Blaustein said. “It’s sort of like a simulacrum of the burger.”

Mr. Blaustein, who is represented by Zane Bennett Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, is originally from New Jersey. In 2004, he received a master of arts from the Pratt Institute, where he studied conceptual art and photography. He has also studied economics and globalization — interests that worked their way into the series.

The project allowed him to ask questions about the things North Americans eat in a fast-food culture. Is this food? Just because we can put something in our mouths, does that make it food? At what point do we decide that something isn’t food?

To let the global supply chain work its magic, Mr. Blaustein used only products he could find in northern New Mexico. He wants viewers to visualize how interconnected global commerce can be.

So did he eat the food? Yes — the blueberries, organic grapefruit, tomatillos, basmati rice, Spanish cookies and saffron. He gave the flour to a nearby soup kitchen.

And the rest?

“I put some of the nastier items outside for the birds, dogs, and coyotes.”