Nothing Beyond the Glass

The Selfie

The photograph appears to document an exhibition.
A darkened interior, carefully lit. Objects placed behind glass. The kind of space where sound feels muted by design, where nothing is meant to surprise you too suddenly. It feels official, almost instructional — a room that tells you how to stand, how long to look, when to move on.

Inside the tank are faces, though they are no longer quite faces. Rounded forms. Simplified features. Mouths opened wide into permanent expressions that resemble smiles only because we have learned to read them that way. The lighting is theatrical, even reverent, as if what is being shown has already been agreed upon as worthy of attention.

There is no sense of distress here. No collapse. No rupture. The forms appear fulfilled in their function. They are not asking to be understood, only to be seen. Seen clearly. Seen briefly. Seen without consequence.

And this is where the image begins to feel less like an artwork and more like a mirror held at an uncomfortable angle.

Why do we care where people are standing?
Why has location replaced presence?
Why does the act of being photographed somewhere — anywhere — carry the implication of meaning?

The smiling figure framed against a landmark, a crowd, a meal, a room full of strangers. The camera held out at arm’s length. The same angle, the same face, the same confirmation that I am here, as if here itself were enough. As if the background mattered more than the interior. As if the self were something that could be proven through placement rather than revealed through depth.

It’s difficult not to notice how benign this all feels, and how bleak that benignity has become. The gesture is gentle. Non-threatening. Inoffensive. And yet it is empty in a very particular way — not empty of joy, but empty of risk. Nothing fragile is allowed through the frame. Nothing unresolved. Nothing that might demand a response beyond recognition.

The tank matters.
The glass matters.

It suggests protection, curation, distance. A space where things are kept safe by being sealed. Whatever complexity exists beyond the surface does not enter the image. The lighting does not reach it. The photograph does not ask for it.

There is an assumption embedded here — that what is shown is sufficient. That this small, polished fraction of a person is not just acceptable, but complete. A carefully turned crystal catching a glint of light, held at exactly the right angle, then frozen there. No further movement required.

And perhaps that is the quiet absurdity the image captures. Not that people present themselves, but that presentation has come to stand in for inner life. That the outer world has become so flattened, so managed, that it has begun to mirror something deeper — a kind of interior dystopia, where complexity feels dangerous and self-exposure feels irresponsible.

It is not only cities, systems, or technologies that feel oppressive. For many, the inner world has become just as hostile. A place where sadness must be hidden, uncertainty masked, tenderness edited out. Where even the self becomes something to manage rather than inhabit.

So the smile is widened.
The moment is staged.
The tank is sealed.

The photograph does not condemn this. It does not mock it. It simply records it — calmly, neutrally — as if documenting a practice that has become so normal it no longer recognises itself as strange.

And that is what makes it unsettling.

Not because it shows a dystopia, but because it shows one that no longer feels like one. A world — both outer and inner — where visibility has replaced intimacy, and where being seen has quietly overtaken being known.