1995
Doll-drums appear as nearly beautiful light etchings of peoples. In various tones, each face greets the viewer with a visual reference: some, a kind of frozen kindling walking about in the streets. Captured with a camera is a momentary lilt at voyeurism? The city ceases in anonymity. Instead, venturing to replace, without the urban mawkishness so often seen in voyeurism’s general safety, the faces of doll-drums behave doubtfully; dutifully, printed; living remarks. By nature, the repetitive quality of each “box” contents, each dweller becomes a bit doll, and a bit rhythmically human. The graphic qualities of a particular paper, and prior that a traditional 35 mm film, are printed via the silver gelatin process, played a bit in terms of surface. The typical, linear, straight print is lost most vitally, because, and conversely, it seems a plastic has literally overlain the “boxes” contents: Faces. Plastic over faces has in fact decayed, wrinkled, even startled here and there with a luminous dirt, serving to overlay and protect each person as the dolls they truly are. It appears these images were made by a photographer herself; over years; as mental notes, faces stored and later communicated by what is a photographic collective, and an archive.
There is light blanched on the cheek of one man in an [unseen] image— a kind of a painful transcendence. Another woman has a low, tepid, amuse on her lowered eyes. Expressions pertinent. Expressions one might like to keep.
Emily Shevenock 2009, a Neologism
