I often feel like the most useful response is simply a description of what a viewer sees, without any critique or praise. So that's what I'm going to give you:
The face is strange, arresting--the cat eyes are what I looked at first. They fall beneath a normal human brow, and stare at you. One pupil is more slitty than the other. The viewer wonders why--was that intentional? You presume it is, but you're not sure--it does serve to emphasize the both/and quality of the whole picture: both human and not-human. Animal like, yet alien, not like an animal. Like a space creature--the round eyes evoking the classic space alien.
Then there seems to be a cat-like nose between the cat-like alien eyes, but then as my eyes followed it down to the end of the nose, it looked penis-like. Then the small mouth on the receding chin: it was like the cat motif, in a subtle way, the way cats have small, not prominent chins, typically. So the face is both familiar and alien at once. The graininess of the black and white evokes a mug shot, and its overall put-together quality also evokes a kind of criminal-image genre--i.e., the composite drawing/ CAD image created from witness descriptions.
It feels both sad--vulnerable, even--and a little scary, unsettling; I feel a little of that feeling I get when I realize I've been staring at a person with a disability. |
