Eye Contact
Exploring the balance of trust, power, and vulnerability in human eye interactions.
Eye Contact watches one person’s fingers move to another person’s eye. Not two strangers glancing across a crowd, but actual contact, a hand coming in close to tend the most defended part of the face, often to lift away a stray eyelash or work loose a speck of grit. These are people who clearly know each other. A stranger would never be let this near.
The eye flinches for a living. It’s built to slam shut at anything that comes toward it, so holding it open while someone’s fingers approach means overriding one of the body’s oldest reflexes. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty described trust as something the body performs before the mind has agreed to it, and that’s exactly what these pictures catch. To let another person handle your open eye is to grant a degree of access almost nothing else in ordinary life asks for. The organ that spends all day looking becomes, for a moment, the thing being looked after.
What the work is drawn to is the tenderness in that, the small service of getting something out of someone’s eye, and the quiet arithmetic of trust running underneath it. Who you let this close, and who you’ll hold still for, says more about a relationship than most of what people say out loud.