Tear sheets are the bruised receipts of people who’ve actually been somewhere, done something that mattered enough for someone else to rip it from the magazine’s guts and say “yeah, this happened.” They’re proof you existed in that moment before the digital avalanche buried everything in algorithmic sludge.
My spread in the Chronicle catching LINES Ballet, that’s not just documentation, it’s testimony. Dancers mid-flight frozen between gravity and grace, printed on paper that smells like newsprint and deadline panic. That’s the kind of evidence that can’t be ctrl-z’d away. The Wired piece on data rescue, Berkeley nerds fighting to save climate information from governmental amnesia, captures the desperate, beautiful absurdity of our moment. Scientists hunched over laptops like monks preserving forbidden texts. That’s punk rock with spreadsheets.
Performance Research quarterly, your meditation on temporal disruption and bodies in space, that’s the legitimacy strip, the academic blessing that says your eye isn’t just sharp, it’s culturally sanctioned sharp. But here’s the thing: these fragments scattered across your page aren’t bragging. They’re scars. Each one represents the exact moment someone with power over ink and paper said your vision was urgent enough to interrupt the endless scroll of sponsored content and catastrophe porn.
Tear sheets are dinosaur bones in the digital era, analog artifacts proving that once, maybe still, the image could interrupt the machine. They’re not portfolio filler. They’re battle damage from actually showing up, camera ready, when the world convulsed and somebody needed to remember it happened at all.
Inquiry Magazine 2019-19