Looking
Figures gathering on a busy street. A tenth of a second. A woman moved through the front of frame while the shutter was open. A record of movement.
A comment arrived under it, parroting what had been captioned.
The image has no exclamation points. It was made in silence, on a Spanish street in the spring. The comment wasn't generated from genuine interest. It wasn't even generated by an actual person. Time was spent making it. None was spent looking.
In the gallery, there is a physical version of this. People who move through at a pace that's immediately transparent. A second, maybe two per piece. Eyes scan, feet keep moving. The work is clocked as present without being received.
Some works on those walls were made slowly. Some in sessions lasting three or four hours. The time is in the work, materially. The pace at which people then pass through the room is its own kind of statement about what looking costs.
The difference between looking and not looking is legible. A response that came from looking has something specific in it: a named detail, a part of the frame, a question that only makes sense after actually attending to what the image is doing. A response produced without looking has none of that. It arrives complete, enthusiastic, already finished before the looking could have happened. The enthusiasm gives it away. Genuine engagement with this kind of work tends to arrive uncertain, working something out, rather than already knowing how it feels.
The practice is built on the former kind of attention. The sustained, slightly inconvenient kind that requires standing still long enough to notice something. The angle of light on a particular surface, the way a figure in motion leaves a different mark than one standing still. It’s what the camera requires when I raise it, and what the charcoal requires on paper: genuine attention to what’s there, not a response to a category. It's what I would like to have come back.
When it doesn’t, the gap is obvious. The comment says something happened. The work shows what was actually there.
I’ve started removing these comments. And blocking accounts that only follow to be followed back. I know what these look like. The pattern has its own legibility. The generic comment under the most recent post, the engagement bombing, the disengagement after they have reeled someone in. The tells are many, the intuition is the same.
I made the work in silence. I'll keep it there.
If something here resonated, send a note below.
