Haley Morris-Cafiero
Haley Morris-Cafiero
The Bully Pulpit
25 color photographs
64 pages
Swiss bound hardcover
9” x 12”
First Edition of 500
Fall Line Press
2019
From the artist:
After her series Wait Watchers went viral, Haley Morris-Cafiero received numerous hateful comments on the internet. The Bully Pulpit is her response to those comments. An inspired Morris-Cafiero realized that she could parody the bullies by creating images and publishing those images on the internet —the same vehicle used for the attacks. Photographing herself costumed like the people who’ve attempted to bully her, she recreated their images found via public profiles by using wigs, clothing, and simple prosthetics and overlaid those images with transcripts of the bullying comments. The result is The Bully Pulpit, a project that pushes the boundaries of self-portraiture and raises questions about the social sphere of the internet.
Essay by Emma Lewis
Book review by Gianna Sergovich |
People want to control Haley Morris-Cafiero’s body--how it looks, how it moves, how it holds space. But Morris-Cafiero is hard to pin down, slipping out of one skin and into the next with the help of makeup, a few bad wigs, and online hate mail. The images that make up The Bully Pulpit wield a kind of dark, self-deprecating humor that diffuses shame and demands visibility. Costuming herself as one of the many internet trolls who’ve sent her hateful messages is Morris-Cafiero’s way of having the last laugh all while exposing the dark underbelly of cyberbullying and internet anonymity. Her work is centered on perception, gaze, social interactions, and the ways she subverts each of them. Not far below the surface run undercurrents that speak on societal standards, agency, and desire.
It seems you can’t talk about The Bully Pulpit, without first taking a dive into Morris-Cafiero’s, Wait Watchers. In 2010, the artist began photographing herself performing mundane tasks in public--reading a map, checking her phone, enjoying a day at the beach. The project came to fruition when the artist was looking at a photo she had taken of herself in Times Square. She noticed the stares, sneers, and smirks on the passerbyers frozen in her frame. Perceiving these first looks as adverse reactions to her physical appearance, she, not unlike a social anthropologist, set out to widen her sample pool to reaffirm her findings.
Morris-Cafiero then spent five years capturing her onlookers and the latent body policing in their gaze until the project’s publishing in 2015. She hoped the work would open dialogue about societal standards and the ways we nonverbally communicate our pleasure or displeasure with one another. As acclaim and praise rolled in, so did the trolls who thought they were safe behind their online profiles. Morris-Cafiero’s inbox was suddenly flooded with opinions about her appearance; a cresting wave of body-policing turned into a full blown tsunami of body shaming and cyberbullying. Not allowing herself to be deterred or forced into hiding, Morris-Cafiero took every negative word into account, held them close, and then spun them into her latest series The Bully Pulpit.
Immediately a passage from Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse comes to mind in which he muses on gaze and looking at the body. In it, Barthes ruminates on desire and looking, and how both can weaken when the object of desire remains inactive. His admiration once again becomes whole and pure when the body begins to move. If Barthes’ writing dissects the anatomy of desire and its nuances, then Morris-Cafiero’s photographs station themselves as a foil to its exposed guts.
The levels of aggression in response to Morris-Cafiero’s work directly correlate to how active her body becomes. In Wait Watchers the more extroverted or animated her posing is, the harsher the judgemental the looks are. The general belief that bullying stops after a certain age, both as the bullied and the bullier, is exposed as untrue. The voices clamouring for Morris-Cafiero to shove herself back into the box societal beauty standards have constructed for her only grow louder with the more light she sheds on their animosity. This begs the question: what are they so mad about? Is it Morris-Cafiero’s unwillingness to play by the “rules”; to be visible in a society that believes anyone without the perfect physique should not seek attention. An insidious hierarchy that underscores the toxic idea that womens’ bodies are only useful or worth attention if they’re desirable to look at. Or are they upset that they’ve been exposed, caught in the act of spreading negativity? That remote removed voice getting louder, their rage intensifying with each performance put on by the artist.
Morris-Cafiero doesn’t just question current social power structures, but subverts them with humor, kitsch, and a boldness that comes across as self-possessed--never reckless. In, The Bully Pulpit, the work becomes less about gaze and looking. Morris-Cafiero becomes less passive. The Thing is no longer happening to her, but is driven by her. The reclamation of her agency through costumery and a Cindy Sherman-esque display of dark theater is captivating in its layered facade. Although brasher than Sherman, Morris-Cafiero’s work is imbued with an honesty and bravery that underscores the empathy her work urges us to express and partake in. It’s the artist holding a mirror up to the world and forcing the viewers to self-reflect on the ways they interact with each other, both physically and online.
Wait Watchers and The Bully Pulpit act like a call and response with each other as well as with their unassuming participants who unwittingly became the subjects of the photographs. If Wait Watchers is Morris-Cafiero wading into the shallow end of the pool, then The Bully Pulpit is a cannonball into the deep end and you can be sure Morris-Cafiero is laughing as she jumps.
