Surface Tension

2013-2021

Essay by Jia Tolentino—

Surface Tension isolates one of the most intimate layers of our daily experience: the place where our warm animal bodies, our simplest instincts, collide with the cold and infinite knowledge of the technological world.

“These photos speak of the startling and uncanny continual interaction between our skin, itself a screen for complex fleshly machinery, and the phone, which masks a world of machinery that was built with the express purpose of more efficiently monetizing everything that our flesh (and mind, and soul) might desire. These two systems, animal and machine, meet on this glassy surface; the marks left behind are the only physical record of this meeting, and the marks have become near-invisible to us, in part because they’re on the eye’s surface, and are thus one of the few parts of daily experience that the eye can’t easily record. 

“Surface Tension is a wordless evocation of the way care fights distance in our everyday lives. The photos suggest the collective reality of millions of anonymous human bodies—on lunch break, at the bus stop, in line at the grocery store, under the covers—turning continually toward our screens, protecting them as if they were puppies, beseeching them as if they were kings.

“The streaks provide proof of our mundane bestial reality—our hormones, our lunch, our particular whorls and spirals. Yet they also document a space of psychological estrangement, of blinking awake every morning to a stream of hallucinatory images a few inches from our face, of scrolling unmoving past so many scenes of catastrophe burning our stories down to bone.”

Surface Tension is shot with an 8 x10 inch film inside a view camera. A raking side light illuminates the greasy smears that remain on an iPad after constant interaction. The intersection of the analogue negative with the digital source material puts into sharp focus the grime, fingerprints and smudges we typically try to look past and ignore. The pictures underneath these traces are appropriated images- almost always disseminated, shared and received without being sought out- raising questions of authorship and authenticity surrounding this ubiquitous mode of visual communication.