In order to analyze an American image, one must analyze American images: lucid explorations of conflict, hardship, selfhood, merriment, strife, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
A Museum of Mannequins: A Study of Mimicry considers New York City spaces that are traditionally and newly seen as commercial by raising the oddities of inconspicuous spaces' grandeur.
A visual information society, always susceptible to the mistrust of mediation, always fraught with anxiety about photography and the news, with their privileged relationship to the real, always worrying about the “truth”––these are observations already metabolized, and the exhibit does not take them in new directions, nor does it find new forms for its expressions.
Although the internet has always depended on circulation, particularly since the visual turn, it is when those aesthetics begin to originate online that the source of our reality begins to falter.
Through photography, Chambi found himself in conversation with the two cultural identities of Peru—Spanish and indigenous Peruvians. His photographic legacy is somehow still potent and representative of communities of people born out of tension.
Read with Butler in mind, Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" portrays the ways an empire manufactures reality, justifying its attack on a broad, different “other” whose lives are “ungrievable” and exist only to further the narrative that the state has constructed of itself.
To those of us who lived in Europe at the time, photos of Independence Square were immediately recognizable. They represented shared wounds and terrifying possibilities for the near future.