What the Fuck Are We Even Doing Here?
Performance photography and critical writing: we’re both chasing the same fucking unicorn. Trying to tell you what went down in that room when the air got thick, when something cracked open and spilled out onto the floor, when you could feel it in your teeth.
Except we’re lying. Not maliciously, maybe, but we’re lying.
Alexey Brodovitch Ballet
We’re not capturing shit. We’re taxidermists. We show up after the animal’s already dead and stuff it into a pose that looks alive if you squint. We hand you the mounted head and say, “See? This is what it was.” A postcard from a place we never actually visited.
And here’s the thing that makes my teeth itch: that fake gets taken seriously.
Performance evaporates. Our stuff sticks around. It gets filed, referenced, quoted, taught. It outlives the sweaty bodies that actually did the thing. Which means the people writing the history are the ones who weren’t there when history got made.
That’s not a bug. That’s the whole fucking system.
Critics and photographers work from a position of beautiful, cowardly safety. We get to choose what mattered after the bodies have left the building. We edit. We frame. We explain. We take the bloody, chaotic mess and sand it down into something that makes sense, then call ourselves insightful for doing it. We’re the cover band claiming we understand the original better than the original understood itself.
Meanwhile, performers are out there working without a net. A moment lands or it eats shit. A bad night doesn’t get recontextualized into “part of the process.” It’s just a bad fucking night, and everybody saw it. They don’t get to workshop their failure in the editing room. They live it, in real time, in front of witnesses.
That’s the fundamental imbalance that powers this entire hustle.
Directors (the real ones, anyway) are trying to jam a crowbar between the text and the flesh. They’re not decorating the script; they’re forcing words through throats that resist them, watching what happens when language gets shoved into bodies it wasn’t designed for. They want discomfort. They want you to hear the violence in making meaning.
But they’re trapped. The text is always already in there, metastasized through everything. I’ve tried to isolate the playwright’s intention from my own neuroses, and it’s like trying to unfuck a situation that was fucked from conception. Interpretation isn’t optional. It’s structural.
Critics pretend we’re above this. We construct our arguments like we’re building cathedrals. We’re precise. We situate. We contextualize everything into neat little boxes labeled by decade and movement and ideology. We turn explosions into case studies. We’re archivists pretending to be witnesses.
Sometimes that’s useful. Sometimes it’s just academic cowardice.
Context can be a weapon you use to avoid actually seeing anything. To skip past this specific body, this specific night, this specific way something broke open or broke down. You can classify something to death without ever letting it touch you. When context arrives too fast, it doesn’t illuminate. It embalms.
Photography makes me angrier because it’s more honest about its betrayal.
A performance photograph is from somewhere. It can’t hide behind abstraction. It’s this body, this light, this fraction of a second that will never repeat. In that sense it’s closer to performance than criticism: it admits its specificity. But it inherits all of criticism’s privilege: the power to choose, to control, to survive.
One frame replaces ninety minutes. One image becomes the official record. The photograph circulates while the performance rots, and eventually the image is what happened. Not evidence. Verdict.
And like criticism, photography gets to play the numbers game. You shoot three hundred frames, publish twelve, and let the archive protect you. Weak work dissolves into “the body of work.” Meaning emerges through accumulation instead of precision. I never have to fully answer for one image because it’s always part of something bigger.
Performers don’t get that kind of shelter.
This is why what we do feels parasitic even when it’s done well. Not because it feeds on performance (that’s expected) but because it feeds on performance’s erasure. We pick the bones of something that can’t talk back. We freeze something that defined itself through motion.
That’s what makes me want to put my fist through a wall.
Not that performance photography and criticism exist, but that they’re granted authority without having earned it through risk. That distance gets converted into expertise. That the thing that survives gets confused with the thing that was true.
Everywhere something raw happens, someone shows up later with a notebook and a theory. Theater. Streets. Riots. Revolutions. The bodies do the work. The scribes arrive afterward with the official story. And too often, the last ones there get to say what it all meant.
So what the fuck are we doing here?
If we’re being honest? We’re not preserving performance. We’re colonizing it. We’re deciding which fragments get to represent a night that can’t defend itself anymore because it’s already gone.
Maybe someday there’ll be a tradition of performance photography that knows what it owes. That understands its own violence. That stops pretending preservation and predation are different things.
But not yet.
Not yet.