O-1 Visas
Found photographs have long been fodder for artists, from John Baldessari’s dotted photocollages to Paul Druecke’s “A Social Event Archive,” ten years of not quite what it sounds like. But those artists worked in a time of physical photography, when finding photos meant frequenting flea markets. Photos move around the world very differently today, as Ziyi Zhang explores in “Pandora Box,” a fascinating multimedia artwork from 2024. Prompted by the discovery that a new hard drive she’d purchased on Amazon contained hundreds of 10-year-old recoverable photo files, she set about finding the people pictured. Using photo-recognition technology, social media, and an impressive set of communication skills, Zhang succeeded in finding many of them and in convincing four to sit for surprisingly intimate interviews. Something about the nostalgia of the earlier images, and Zhang’s unpurposeful position as an experimental artist, seemed to allow them to open up to her. The entire investigation is presented in a series of panels containing screen shots and explanatory notes, and it’s an uncomfortable journey to be poking through people’s private lives, which inevitably get revealed despite Zhang’s obvious care. As she explains in her interview with a German male model, who talks candidly about body dysmorphia, “Being an artist saved me from being creepy.”
—Lori Waxman 2025-12-18 12:54 PM