In America (1986), Baudrillard observed that the American smile is not an expression of genuine happiness but a kind of social contract — a permanent, obligatory display of openness and goodwill. It signals “I am not a threat” rather than…
Somewhere in the writings of Buddhist nun Pema Chodron (), there is a passage in which she remarks that self-knowledge can arrive like looking in a mirror and finding a gorilla staring back at you. You feel horrible, just the…
Difficult images are a particular preoccupation of mine. Following Susan Sontag’s framework, I use “difficult” to mean images that are emotionally or morally demanding to look at — images that resist passive consumption and implicate the viewer, the maker, and…
A meditation on eye contact via mass mediated reality. Do we trust someone more when they look us in the eye? What about when those eyes are presented to us via lens capture and distribution via a screen? This image…
I was once told by a friend that they could easily spot me at a great distance simply from the way I move my feet when I am walking. There’s a great deal of truth to this. We exhibit an…