- On Connor Elmore’s “Sanguine Intimacy” (Jenni Quilter)
- On Shawn Harris’s “The Cost . . .” (Jr. Eds. for Andrei Guruianu)
- On Ace Harvest’s “Antepartum . . .” (Abigail Joseph)
- On Jia He’s “The One Who Listens to Me” (Ger O’Donoghue)
- On Andrew Hua’s “The Invisible Coup” (Noelle Molé Liston)
- On Camryn Loor’s “A Woman Confused” (Bruce Bromley)
- On Mikah Mazza’s “(Queer) Bait and Switch” (Conor Creaney)
- On Iris O’Connor’s “On Aerial Photography . . .” (Jenni Quilter)
- On Alexander Palmieri’s “Still Death” (Michael Shum)
- On Zahara Slovenski’s “Abortion! Honka Honka!” (Zach Udko)
- On Jingshan Wu’s “I See: Between Earth and Sky” (Amy Hosig)
- On Bobby Zabin’s “Reclaiming the American West” (Alexandra Falek)
In the first or second class of this video essay progression, Connor decided that his video essay would be about male intimacy; earlier in the year he had (as he says in the essay) a strong emotional and intellectual reaction to Dhont’s film Close. In that sense, he was primed to be swift and decisive in identifying a subject he knew he wanted to think more about. The initial drafting felt exciting to him; he was writing about something he really cared about.
What really strikes me, looking back at the final draft of “Sanguine Intimacy,” is how confident Connor was in preserving the slow beat of Dhont’s edits in Close inside his own video essay. It can be really complicated—particularly when you’re moving quickly through a writing process—to think about the relationship between your experience of the texts you’re discussing and the relationship you’re constructing for your reader as they encounter those same texts, likely for the first time. In our excitement to develop an argument of our own, we sometimes forget how much of the original text our reader needs to actually experience for themselves; we can whittle a text we spent hours reading down to a brief summary that barely registers to our reader, but that economy of comprehension has a price. So it’s really interesting to see which texts Connor feels comfortable speeding through, and which texts he knows he needs to slow down for; where the analysis can be allegro, and where it has to be adagio. I think his confidence in crafting the difference came from how much he personally valued Close; he did not want to do wrong by that film. When I shared this observation with him, he also added that it was special to have tools other than periods and paragraph breaks to shape and pace an essay.
I know it’s hard to have the reaction Connor had to Close to an essay given to you by a professor in a required writing class. What happens when how you feel about a text isn’t as swift or as decisive? What do you do when you’re simply struggling to understand what the writer is actually saying? That struggle can feel embarrassing and frustrating–particularly when other students appear so decisive about their reaction to a text–but what seems really important to remember is that there should be a gap between you and another writer’s text, and that while this gap can take on all kinds of qualities, it is crucial that it exists, that we respect it, and that we show our reader its dimensions. That’s why I so admire Connor’s essay–that despite his strong identification with Close, his video essay still insists on establishing a relationship of mutual respect rather than projection.
—Jenni Quilter
Shawn Harris’s essay on the impact of technology on our everyday lives beautifully weaves his own personal experiences with the ideas of essayists Stephen Marche and Jonathan Safran Foer. Drawing on his experience attending an ultra-Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, which banned all use of Internet-capable devices and social media, Shawn considers whether this ban protected him from the dangers of digital living that Marche and Foer warn about, such as its effects on our self-knowledge and ability to feel complex emotions. The area where this paper most excels is its use of putting Marche and Foer’s ideas in conversation with one another, leading to the development of new ideas and questions to consider.
Using his Progression 1 exercises from Writing the Essay, Shawn effectively represented both Marche and Foer’s arguments and carefully began to formulate the problem of his essay: How might technology impact our ‘humanity’ and ‘degrade’ our human spirit? Through each exercise, Shawn narrowed down the representations of his sources and demonstrated the importance of how representations, while remaining holistic, also lay the ground for what will become a specific argument. He honed in on the most important parts of Marche and Foer’s ideas, developing beautiful representations of these two texts into an original idea that transcends both of them.
While his representations and use of conversation to deepen his argument was particularly adept, one of the strongest points in the essay was Shawn’s use of personal experience to develop his argument even further. As Shawn reflected on his own writing process, he mentioned that he was reluctant to let his religious practices guide his essay; however, with a push from his professor, he challenged himself to use his experiences as “experiential evidence” or a third source for his paper, deepening the conversation between Marche and Foer. This is evident in his final draft, which ends with a thought-provoking new idea that only his experience could allow him to pose: that “living today requires that we carry the tools of our destruction with us in our pockets.” Through his carefully curated evidence and analysis, Shawn asks us to follow his nuanced perspective on technology as it develops through his thinking, and leaves us with a new idea.
—Mercer Street Junior Editors for Prof. Andrei Guruianu
The fall semester in my class always begins with a museum visit. Guided by the resonant voices of authors like Mark Doty, Teju Cole, and Jeanette Winterson, I ask my students to venture out, explore a museum, find a work of art that calls to them, and then challenge themselves to practice what Winterson calls “long looking”: spending an hour or so in the company of a work of art, really examining it, considering what the work has to say, seeing how an initial flicker of interest or attraction or questioning might deepen and develop into an insight, an inquiry, more questions, an idea.
Students (even those who seem initially skeptical) seem to enjoy this assignment; most choose an artwork that means something to them; many end up skillfully representing the piece they’ve chosen and their own developing response to it. But only very rarely does a student actually record the kind of visceral, sometimes uncomfortable, shifting, and indeed transformative encounter with an artwork that our authors lay out as a model. I know that such an encounter is possible, and I try to set up the conditions for it—but the truth is, of course, that it is not at all common. And being able to effectively inscribe it into essay form is even less common.
Ace’s essay manages to do just this. It brings its reader into the Whitney with Ace, and carries us along with them as they are struck—knocked off balance, shocked, embattled, yet entranced—by Mary Kelly’s video. Ace’s representation does precisely what I tell my students a representation should do: it describes the object itself, but as the author uniquely experiences it – so that author’s perspective informs the landscape of the essay; so that the reader’s vision of the object is primed for the evidence and interpretation that follow. Ace’s layers of description, analysis, intertextual work, and personal narration unfold so beautifully that even as they take us in some quite painful directions, we feel held and guided by the empathy and clarity of their vision. Ultimately this receptive yet resolute quality allows Ace to bring us to a place that clearly emerges from the encounter with both Kelley and Cole, yet is very much Ace’s own.
Finally, I want to say that this essay challenged me. My own response to Mary Kelly’s Antepartum is very different than Ace’s—to the extent that, at first, as compelled as I was by Ace’s rendering of their encounter, I felt that there was something potentially missing in what they were drawing from the work. I offered Ace some queries, some possible lines of redirection or reconsideration, based on my own viewing and experience, yet (I thought) pertinent to their inquiry as well. But Ace, while gracefully revising their essay in line with some of my feedback (especially regarding the fuller incorporation of Cole’s text), stuck firmly with their own line of thinking, and I came to admire the integrity of Ace’s conclusions as much as I admired the alert eloquence of Ace’s voice and the nuanced intimacy of their narration. Ace taught me to see Mary Kelly’s work in a new way, and to think about my students’ work in a new way as well.
—Abigail Joseph
He Jia’s essay responds to a critique (or “reckoning”) progression. In this assignment, students read a selection of published essays, select one as their primary text, and are tasked with composing an essay that offers both a nuanced critical assessment of the primary text’s argument and a novel, insightful contribution to the discourse it represents. Jia rises to a central challenge of this assignment by establishing a critical stance towards the primary text that facilitated both the analytic and the constructive demands of the prompt.
Dhruv Khullar writes with uneasy resignation about the growing roles A.I. large language models play in psychotherapeutic dialogue. In Khullar’s view, fairly represented by Jia, the irredeemable limitation of such technology is that it can never be what it simulates: the simulation of empathetic dialogue will never amount to an actual experience of empathy. Early in the progression, Jia acutely observed that it was a little unreasonable of Khullar to focus on what the technology was categorically not. Jia’s initial stance, if expressed tendentiously, might be an accusation of a perfectionist fallacy: Khullar, in measuring the technology against the yardstick of an idealized interpersonal therapeutic relationship, evades the burden of considering its efficacy and limitations on its own terms.
I admire Jia’s willingness to outwait this first reaction and to discover a more generative angle of engagement. Let’s grant Khullar’s point that A.I. can only generate a “therapeutic illusion” of empathy. Let’s grant that we won’t experience interpersonal empathy when interacting with this technology. With those concessions made, constructive questions can emerge. Can we disentangle the experience of empathy from the simulation of empathy that humans perform towards each other? Granting that empathy is an important element of an interhuman therapeutic dialogue, what role precisely does it play in the therapeutic process? What are its limits? By asking these questions, Jia re-opened dialogue with Khullar and researched how the technology’s affordances might relate to the very deficit Khullar emphasizes.
On and off the page, Jia exhibits a capacity to abide with—and perhaps a pleasure in standing back to observe—contradictory and difficult dimensions of life. That distance and patience in “The One Who Listens To Me” may offer a teachable principle on establishing critical stances. More broadly, this essay models a critical ethos I find admirable: perceptive, tactful, worldly in its skepticism, and ardent in its curiosity.
—Ger O’Donoghue
Andrew Hua’s essay was part of our second essay progression called Critical Analysis, which responded to the following prompt: “Using at least three sources, develop an argument that offers an assessment of the value and limitations of an essay on Digital Age life.” In this critique, I ask students to transcend familiar binaries – yes and no, right and wrong, same and different – and to abandon an assumption that two oppositions are mutually exclusive. Instead, students seek a dialectical engagement in which the writing, like the teacher-student arm wrestling scene from the film Half Nelson, moves dynamically towards and away from the targeted author in ways that cannot be captured by reductive agreement or disagreement.
In his draft, Andrew suggested Zuboff “neglects to fully explain how the public fell prey to infiltration by social media,” to which I suggested, in my comment: “Can you show what precisely she missed in this booming of companies? Her version of the story is that they got wealthier because of data gathering and manipulating towards more engagement and growth.” In the final version, he added the following question, which helps to show his line of thinking more clearly: “How have people grown to trust algorithms and social media while growing increasingly distrustful of governments, corporations, and, eventually, each other?” The mystery, then, is not just something Zuboff overlooked, but is actually an underlying causative factor.
In this unit, students also aim to expand their repertoire of rhetorical critique by going beyond naming gaps in the author’s work as their primary strategy of critique. Andrew’s essay expands our understanding of how the public first had to mystify the process of algorithmic surveillance in order to trust corporate entities, which in turn, allowed for the rise of surveillance capitalism.
We use many metaphors in class to aid in our understanding of critical analysis: from the essay as a form of a podcast hosted by the writer to the idea of a good critique as hitting the “weight-bearing” columns of the key author’s argument. If we imagine a text as a structure, then a critique with stakes should aim for a foundational element of the essay – the structural beams or foundation, not just the window or decoration. In his cover letter for his final essay, Andrew riffed on this metaphor and likened his use of Bogost to a “bridge crossing from the beginning to the end of Zuboff’s epistemic coup.” The essay demonstrates the stakes of Bogost’s ideas in terms of Zuboff by skillfully using real-world examples of people’s incontrovertible faith in algorithms like GPS accidents. Andrew’s smart interrogation of material evidence builds towards the immaterial concept of algorithmic faith. By doing so, Andrew’s essays simultaneously enacts what we’ve dubbed the “so what” of critical analysis, as well as another core tenet of writing: moving from evidence to idea.
—Noelle Molé Liston
For our last body of work, I share audio/visual materials with my students – work by thinkers from the arts and the sciences, ranging from visual artists Judy Baca, Titus Kaphar, and Kent Monkman to makers in the sciences including Merlin Sheldrake, Ed Yong, and Suzanne Simard. Students write in real-time, in class, responding to the same sorts of questions that they’ll have to aim at the thinkers they select, in any discipline. They write in a shared Google document, and I do this writing, too, so that we are all in dialogue.
Once students select their thinker for their presentation, I give them the following advice about how to conceptualize what they are moving towards:
You need to focus, first, on: what’s the larger problem that you want to explore, larger than your thinker’s personal issues. That means: you’re not making a presentation about a thinker; you’re exploring a specific larger problem and using your thinker’s perspective on that problem as a point of investigation. So: you’ll need to be sufficiently clear, up front and directly, on the larger problem at stake in the presentation and your own idea about that larger problem. And you’re using a research source to give you another way of thinking about this larger problem. Your ending section should look hard at the deeper significance of all this, or: why should we care?
These prompts help students avoid getting lost in their thinker’s biography, instead fostering their power to conceive of an urgent problem, build an original idea about that problem, and pitch their labors at the actual world, where their readers, viewers and audience live.
Camryn’s ability to connect beauty and analytical ability is there even in her title: Ana Mendieta may have been “a woman confused,” but this video essay clarifies how that confusion was foisted upon her, as well as its costs attached to her gender, crafting work in a male-centered profession—and world. Camryn also shows, very clearly, how Mendieta made something out of this confusion, which reminds all of us that such a feat is possible.
The need for students to resist collapsing the distinctions between their thinker and the problem they’re exploring, and their own idea about that problem, made room for Camryn to think, to reconsider, to make something alive out of the distinctions to which she concentrated on attending. And that is the opposite of confusion.
—Bruce Bromley
As readers, we are always hoping to learn something about the surprising and complex ways that the world actually works. A good essay can help us to see the difference between how thorny and difficult questions, such as those of identity and representation, “should” work in an ideal world and how they actually do work in the messy and ever-surprising world that we actually live in. Mikah takes on such a challenge in this essay, and guides us expertly through the surprising nuances of how audiences respond to subtext and ambiguity in queer-coded characters.
In exploring these cultural trends, Mikah makes some really insightful claims, arguing that the challenge for the observer is that both queerbaiting and queercoding rely on the “intentional use of implied queerness,” and in both cases, that queerness is ambiguous and deniable. For the unscrupulous creator, queerbaiting is a way to draw in queer audiences without having to risk anything; for the authentic creator who cares about queer representation, queercoding is a way to subversively introduce representations of queerness into spaces where they might not otherwise be accepted. In distinguishing one from the other, Mikah has to grapple with the motives and intentions of artists, and with the manifold responses of audience members. Navigating this kind of murky territory where nothing is entirely clear or directly stated, and where controversial positions can be implied without the creators having to take a concrete stand, is a real challenge, and Mikah wisely takes a heavily evidence-based approach to making sense of how it plays out in specific instances.
This is all the more impressive because it is really tricky to speak for entire groups of people without oversimplifying the often-cacophonous range of perspectives that might be represented within that group. Rather than rely on a simplistic “we,” Mikah understands that there are many groups in this conversation, and to do justice to the complexity of the issues they need to be attentive to this diversity of perspectives. The audience for a cultural work can often be made up of people with diametrically opposed values (one example here: both queer folk and homophobes avidly read Harry Potter texts and respond very differently to what they find), and Mikah takes on the challenge of unpacking the moral and intellectual complexities of the cultural conversation that this topic generates. The result is an essay that helps us to understand this topic’s history, reflect upon its present incarnations, and perhaps anticipate its future.
—Conor Creaney
Iris’s argument in her essay really began to develop when she allowed herself to be honest about how she was feeling about Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” She liked Mulvey’s argument but she also found it hard to follow, and she wasn’t sure she had the right to find it hard to follow – if her reaction was a legitimate form of reckoning.
When Iris gave herself the space to write about the experience of reading Mulvey, Mulvey’s approach and writing style became more visible as a thing Iris could write about and analyze.
In our conference together, we realized that she needed another text that would help her flesh out the implications of Mulvey’s approach, which was how I knew to recommend Anna Badkhen’s review of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights. Badkhen is thinking about what is lost when we take the view from 35,0000 feet–we might comprehend a vast scale, but we also lose lived ratios of relationship. That visual metaphor of height in relationship to understanding was helpful to Iris in so many ways, as she realized that she had also been writing, in other exercises, about subterranean tunnels of conversation with one of her closest friends, Celia. All of a sudden, there were consequences to those initial realizations that seemed important to explore further. What does it mean to have a written perspective at 35 000 feet and a written perspective that feels underground? Why might we feel more comfortable with one height instead of another? Should we change heights?
Quite early on in the writing process, Iris realized that Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides seemed to be doing something very literal with the idea of the male gaze, but it took a few drafts to realize that it wasn’t just about proving Coppola is “showing” the male gale, but that Iris’s own [potentially internalized male] gaze on that film had changed over time as she had transitioned from childhood through adolescence into adulthood. Looking back at her essay, what I most respect about Iris’s approach is how she let her inquiry evolve—every draft ended up with a different conclusion—and that this evolution came about because she was willing to notice and be honest about what she felt tentatively, rather than what she felt passionately.
—Jenni Quilter
The author, Alexander Palmieri, entered his Writing the Essay class as an accomplished reader and writer already, and much of this essay’s brilliance must necessarily be attributed to this talent alone. What our class offered to Alex was a space—one in which he could play with his prose, experiment with form, and develop and refine his thinking.
“Still Death,” his provocative and incisive look at the power of news photography to both arrest and paralyze us, came out of the capstone Conversation Essay assignment, which asks students to create and manage a conversation among disparate voices, including their own. The essay demonstrates many of the principles I seek to teach my students, such as: telling a compelling story; using vivid, concrete examples; and avoiding cliche.
One of the aspects of “Still Death” that particularly stands out is Alex’s ability to synthesize events that happened long ago, such as the Vietnam War, with current situations in the world in a way that is sophisticated and insightful rather than reductive. As Alex suggests, in some sense what Berger and Sontag write about war photography is even more relevant in our time, given the ease with which anyone can use their phone to take a photo or share someone else’s. More than ever, we are inundated with these “photographs of agony” which, as Alex so keenly observes, “are unable to evoke the response desired yet impossible to keep from reposting, desperate as we are in our inadequacy of response.”
—Michael Shum
In the final unit of the semester, we examine the challenges and pitfalls associated with creating art about particular controversies. Our goal is to approach familiar topics with a sense of curiosity, avoiding broad generalizations and unsubstantiated claims. We begin with a Viewing Journal: a real-time chronicle of each student’s gut reactions (emotional and intellectual) to at least five different works of art about their chosen social issue (one page of informal notes per work of art). Designed to capture a student’s individual viewing experience and track patterns across several works, Zahara’s journal radiates the same level of excitement present in her final video essay. For instance, before breaking down observations about the formal elements in Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, she writes: “Oh my god. This was heart wrenching-ly good. I’m kind of in shock and numb immediately after watching it because a lot of my processing is just feeling.”
Zahara developed a focused central question early on in the process: How confrontational does a work of art need to be in order to initiate social change? Her Viewing Journal notes often return to this question, with each work adding a new layer of complexity to her evolving ideas.
After watching five full-length works, Zahara scoured YouTube for film shorts, comedy pieces, and interviews with artists about the difficulties of creating abortion narratives. The SNL sketch that inspired the title for this essay, for instance, led her to Cecily Strong’s interview with Variety, a highly effective component of her ending.
Before drafting her script, Zahara developed a matrix—a sorting tool and a graphic representation of her evaluation of each piece of evidence. I recommend that students select a variable for the x-axis that tracks a choice made by the artists (in this case: diverting vs. disturbing), and allow the y-axis to measure a work’s effectiveness in raising social consciousness. By assigning a quantifiable (and entirely subjective) value to each work of art, the matrix serves as a visual snapshot that captures the essay’s core argument.
Zahara’s script is economical and entertaining from start to finish, with smooth transitions that guide us from one turning point to the next. In a mere 90 seconds, her beginning deftly sets the stage by introducing us to the status quo (how Hollywood has traditionally portrayed abortion), the destabilizing moment (the 2022 Dodds decision), the problem facing artists today who engage with this topic, and her essay’s central question. Zahara is also keenly aware that for her own essay to be effective, she needs to engage her audience; she certainly accomplishes this task both on the audio and visual tracks. She has mastered the ability to integrate her own voice and personality into an argument, undoing the unfortunate assumption that fine academic writing requires work on the part of the audience in order to be understood.
—Zach Udko
There are so many ways to read Jingshan Wu’s text, but one could read his elegant essay as essentially epistemic: this feels like something close to the essence of knowledge practices.
In both mode and argument, Jingshan resists the violence of positioning any truth as final and asks us to acknowledge the essential instability of knowledge.
This instability does not escape reaching the Subject-Object, Self-Other dichotomy, which Jingshan also dissolves, moment to moment: he allows himself to be looked at, to be questioned by, and to be de-centered by the texts. Jingshan writes:
To align with a perspective like [Sebastiao] Salgado’s is to allow ourselves into a space of instability: a place that blurs ground and sky. Such a choice is as sublime as it is dangerous and terrifying. It means to face the instability between subjects; to accept it; to acknowledge the instability as part of ourselves, to acknowledge that we are instability. It is to realize that we are the victims who are suffering and marginalized, and, at the same time, the murderer who caused such tragedy.
In this mode of epistemology, who we are – and where and how we are positioned as knowledge-creators – is in question.
“[T]he movement of questioning [of the text] is toward me, and all my familiar concepts,” reads Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” reads Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s epigraph to his last thesis in Monster Culture; Seven Theses—two shadow theory texts left invisible, but felt here, as classroom pedagogical presences.
Pedagogically, this progression (often called the “Reckoning”), seeks to understand texts and keep open to limits in those texts – aporias, impasses – places where we might find new possibilities in their rhetorical or structural contradictions, lacunae, meaning-making, or unexplored tensions, and so on. The text Jingshan is reckoning with does just that, and models it, and Jingshan in turn “reckons” for himself, testing his own primary readings of the photographs in question, amidst divergent and complex, opposed criticisms; deeply honoring and extending his primary text’s already extremely complicated reckoning; reading and re-reading Salgado’s photographs (siding with Latin American critic Eduardo Galeano’s ideas, and even revealing Galeano’s ideas further than Strauss’s essay’s frame allows for); while ultimately finding a foundational assumption in Strauss’s thinking (i.e., the assumptive separateness of self and other) worthy of re-thinking, a limit we might call it, in the text, such that Salgado’s photographs and Strauss’s argument are compelled to be understood from a new epistemic position, providing the grounds for an argument of the student’s own.
It seems as if both the disorientation of the Copernicus epigraph, and the blinding lightscape of the Salgado photograph as rendered in Jingshan’s interpretation, stay with us throughout the whole essay. The way Jinshan reads Salgado’s photograph, and allows us to read and be read by it, seems to provide a semiotic transposition* for his essay’s argument.
The carefulness of all of Jingshan’s readings and re-readings, understandings and new understandings, allowing for heterogeneous positionalities and possibilities, seems to flare up before us**, briefly, into pure, intense thought—thought and implication.
References:
*semiotic transposition is borrowed from Serge Gavronsky’s introduction to Francis Ponge, The Sun Placed in the Abyss and Other Texts.
** Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language.
Gadamer, Hans Georg. Gadamer on Celan; “Who am I and Who are You?” and other essays, trans. and edited by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. Albany: SUNY Press, 1977.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster theory: reading culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
—Amy Hosig
In the early days of our last course progression, Bobby and I met to discuss his final decision between two photo projects that most captivated him, one of which would become the heart of his critical review essay. Both were timely and asked questions about national identity: What does it mean to be American? Who is included in representations of this “Americanness?” Bobby sensed that one of the projects would be the “easier” option because he thought he already “got” what the photographer was up to. Meanwhile, the other project presented a true intellectual challenge: it was evocative and compelling, and Bobby felt an increasing personal connection to it. But he was uncertain about how he might respond to it in the following weeks in the ways the prompt proposed — that is, critically and creatively, with openness and rigor.
In choosing the latter project, West by Kathya María Landeros, Bobby accepted the standing invitation to take a risk and embrace uncertainty, two central principles of our classroom community. He followed his growing curiosity, unique perspective as a painter, and his new understanding from our coursework that asking questions and inductive writing lead to genuine discovery. It’s clear that Bobby’s choice to venture into unfamiliar territory was rewarding. His essay offers an incisive and personal response to Landeros’ work. He sustains a diligent line of inquiry throughout, showing us how the photographer’s images challenge limited narratives and representations of the American West.
In his search to complicate his reading of West by engaging with essential secondary sources, a key part of the essay prompt, Bobby enriches the conversation by drawing on Sandra Cisneros’ notion of “arbitrary borders” and Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of a “return odyssey” from south to north. In conversing with these two consequential reconsiderations of borders, journeys and homelands, Bobby creates space to challenge anti-immigrant rhetoric about the supposed “invasion” of the West. And in conjunction with his percipient readings of select photos, he grounds his argument in his attention to the humanity, tenderness and rootedness of the people—who inhabit and contribute to this country—and the places Landeros makes visible. Through his thoughtful work with evidence, Bobby encourages us to look closely at the beauty, stillness and integrity of this photographer’s nuanced visual story.
Bobby’s choice of focus feels urgent in the context of our polarized social, cultural and political landscape. He reminds us that the work of acknowledging the complex layers of this country’s present and history requires acknowledging the rich layers (and cultures, stories and livelihoods) of all its people. “West,” Bobby writes in the ending, “is more than a depiction of belonging or an imaginatively utopian portrayal of peaceful integration; it is an expansive correction of a foundational but excluded part of American history about Latinx presence in this country.”
I admire Bobby’s authentic ethos on the page, which motivates us to stay connected and follow the threads of his inquiry. In his notes about the essay in this year’s edition of Mercer Street, Bobby reflects, “I felt like I had stumbled upon Landeros’ work on purpose, motivating me to write what I feel and think, not what I thought someone might like to read.” And it’s this sense of permission—together with a flourishing sense of confidence in his voice and observations—that shape the depth and care with which he sees and responds to West.
—Alexandra Falek