ALL THE EYES ARE MINE

All the Eyes are Mine is a series of found Victorian-era portrait photographs that have been digitally manipulated so that my eyes appear in every face. The original photographs were collected from various antique shops in New York and do not contain faces of anyone I know or was related to.

The replacement of their eyes with mine came from a bizarre longing to understand and experience a different time – that of the Victorian period, a century ago – but also a different space – an imagining of death. It creates an uncanny inversion in which the living haunts the dead, or perhaps attempts to revive them. The unnaturalness of the act is felt upon the identification of the repetition; the realization that the wall of portraits is staring back with slightly different versions of the same gaze.

This series of photographs was installed in various gallery wall arrangements and appeared as an Artist’s Project in Esopus Magazine (issue 4, spring 2005).