I saw this remarkable photo spread on Purselipsquarejaw and can not but help passing it along here.

These are the most striking photos I have seen about how bodies are literally made. A certain vision of self, physique, right, and wrong, culturally scuplted across time and space in the US through a dizzing range of everyday practices. This is visual ethnography at its finest, driving home how text, taken alone can be a medium of extreme poverty. While it is powerful and concise, and can be poetic and evocative, text alone is sometimes hard to capture the actual force and depth of what you are trying to capture.

Zonezero nicely theorizes the nature of digital photos and its implications for capturing a sense of reality in the making, a new type of the real.

I guess I am struggling with that right now with my dissertation, wrapping up two chapters that mean a lot to me for they touch upon many personal experiences. And by virtue of experiencing them, I know my representation is just a mere shadow of the actual events I witnessed.

Anyway, I better get back to that, shadow or not, its needs to be done, soon.:-)