Ethics and Aesthetics of Difference

Concept

There is a moment in every genuine encounter with an image — a photograph, a painting, a body moving across a stage — where ethics and aesthetics cease to be separate concerns. The image either opens a world or closes it. It either calls the viewer into a relation with what is other, or it domesticates the other into something already known. I am interested in the practices, the dispositions, the forms that make the opening possible.

This is not a theoretical enquiry in the abstract sense. It is grounded in decades of making images and watching what they do to rooms full of people. What I write here is residue from that practice.

A place to begin: A Double Entendre in Difference: Educating Children for a Planetary Future →