Andrew Prayzner
The images in this series are from a National Geographic article that chronicles the Colombian drug trade in the 1980s. Dozens of anonymous mules are posted on a corkboard, though there is a strange continuity to their poses and smuggling apparatuses. The interest for me in these pictures is the synthesis of a kind of vulnerable figurative narrative with the cocoon-like structures that cling to their hosts. The pixilated faces, while there to presumably protect the subjects’ identity, introduce a moment where individual features are sublimated by technological geometry. As stated in Peter Halley’s The Crisis in Geometry, “geometry (once) provided a sign of stability, order, and proportion, today it offers an array of shifting signifiers and images of confinement and deterrence.” Here the geometric form additionally operates as a representation of a postmodern power structure as demonstrated in contemporary architecture, technology, and aesthetics.