Distortion #2

After walking the Roman Forum, I found myself stepping into the quiet central courtyard of the Capitoline Museums — one of the oldest public museums in the world — where, almost without announcement, a marble finger the size of a small monument sits on a pedestal. It is a fragment of the colossal statue of Constantine, a figure so enormous that no complete reconstruction has ever been possible. What remains are pieces: a hand, a foot, a head, and this finger, larger than any human body, carved with the same precision as something meant to be seen up close and yet built to a scale that makes closeness feel beside the point.

I was essentially alone. The courtyard was still. I stood in front of it with my Hasselblad and felt the particular sensation of something familiar made unrecognizable — a finger, which I have always known the shape of, rendered so large it became something else entirely. I photographed it on 120mm film because I wanted to sit with that feeling rather than explain it away.

Distortion #2 is an archival giclée print held in a small antique Roman frame — one of a pair I found together at a Roman flea market, the two now holding companion photographs from the same courtyard. The oval print itself measures just four inches; a finger that dwarfs the human body, now reduced to something you could hold in the palm of your hand. The distortion moves in every direction at once — the statue built beyond human scale, the photograph pulling it back down to something almost miniature, the ornate red velvet frame holding all of it with the reverence usually reserved for the precious and the intimate. The distortion in this piece is not a technical effect. It is the scale itself — because sometimes the things that loom largest in our lives, the problems, the fears, the old wounds, are not actually as large as they feel. They are bigger than life in the way a dream is bigger than life, vivid and consuming and real, until the moment you step back and realize you were always larger than what was frightening you.

This piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.