Please Hold Eye Contact
The face arrives in pieces.
Two enormous eyes occupy their own fractured world above while the mouth, nose and skin remain almost uncomfortably close below. A finger rises toward the lips, suggesting silence, secrecy, restraint—or possibly that we’ve walked into a conversation we weren’t supposed to hear.
The composition borrows the cut-and-reassemble logic of Hannah Höch, whose photomontages turned familiar human features into wonderfully unstable new identities. There’s some Man Ray here too: the Surrealist fascination with isolating parts of the body until an eye or mouth stops behaving like anatomy and starts behaving like an object. And the saturated skin, theatrical cropping and faint sense that something glamorous has gone slightly wrong recalls Guy Bourdin’s fashion photography.
That red does a remarkable amount of work. It slices horizontally across the image, then drops vertically over the finger, forming an almost accidental crosshair. Your eye gets pinned to the center while the face seems to come apart around it.
And then there are the tears. One tiny detail changes the temperature of the whole picture.
Funny how a face can contain this many eyes and still refuse to tell you what it’s thinking.
FUN FACT
The term photomontage was embraced by Berlin Dada artists in the early 20th century, who liked the idea that they were “assembling” pictures almost like mechanics rather than making polite, traditional art.
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Available as a museum-quality print.
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