The Right Proportions

These photographs highlight how we gauge the right proportion of time to speak or to listen to each other, given the way our interactions are filtered through our own needs and self-concerns. In a lobby of a church, a couple practices music and applies makeup for an unknown performance in front of an unseen audience, without paying attention or regard to each other. Another photograph shows a witch stirring a cognitive pot to parse meaning from a sentence’s grammatical structure alone, without otherwise having to pay attention to what anyone else is saying. In another picture, an angelic cherub presents a woman dining at a restaurant with a menu of canned responses to her partner’s endless prattling, as each person prepares to hit the chess clock indicating their turn to speak.