We Contain Our World / Our World Contains Us

​​A man arrived at his office building very early in the morning and was delighted by the way that the reflection and the glass doors captured two versions of himself. One was on the outer doors, but a second one recurred on the glass doors of the airlock inside. He had seen this effect before and captured it, but he couldn’t stop being excited when he ran into it.

Something about the Maruska Doll version of human experience — inside of this version of me there is another version and so on and so forth.

It wasn’t until he saw the picture later that he saw that the interior space of the man in the photo had been utterly obliterated and replaced by the interior space of the building itself.

This seemed like a more powerful visual metaphor, even though as an omen, it does not bode well for the question of whether or not his selfhood will ever be able to exceed the internalized forms that his occupation have wrought upon him.

As the photographer meditated on this question, he decided to toy with the scale of the building and the person.

The photographer wanted to allow the boundaries of the man’s body to govern this representation.

The photographer, influenced by the tradition of portraiture, disliked how the original photograph had merged the building with the head and body of the subject. He forcibly separated them.

Once he had created this version, he realized how much the themes of this particular photograph resonated with the themes of the TV show : severance.

We do not escape from the complexes that our work afford us. There is no severance.

We contain the worlds from which we come and those worlds persist in ways that we cannot fully imagine or sometimes even discern, in our thoughts and actions.