The old painters had their vanitas: a skull on a table, an hourglass, a guttering candle, a wilted flower. Reminders for the living that every possession ends the same way.
This is a vanitas for our own age.
The skull is black and covered in a fine dust of colour, as if it had been lying for a long time under the light of a thousand screens. Where an eye once was, a single red crystal burns, cold and bright, like a status lamp that no one switched off. And beneath it, the cables: an audio jack, a USB plug, the cords that once tied this head to everything it knew. All of them unplugged. All of them leading nowhere.
We built tools that were meant to set us free, and they did. They carried our voices across oceans, kept our memories, answered our questions before we finished asking them. But somewhere along the way the tools grew faster than the hands that held them, and cleverer than the hearts behind those hands. Each new device promised to connect us, and each one left us a little more alone.
So here is the last connection to be cut. Not a crash, not a catastrophe. Just a quiet unplugging, and the smoke drifting over what remains.
The question this skull asks is very old. Only the props have changed. What are you holding on to, and what will it mean when the power goes out?
Made in early 2024, this was the collection's first statement against the synthetic image, long before the manifestos.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2024.)
