The following article was originally published by Square Cylinder on June 16, 2025.

“You the performer” is a tightly organized photography show featuring nine artists who, taken together, survey the evolving dialectic between the camera and its subject. As those two archetypal roles play out behind and before the picture plane, one sees an unfolding discourse of agency and intimacy, what the camera can access, and how its subject retains its power to disrupt, destabilize, or manipulate the frame in which they are depicted. Not surprisingly, the works play off themes of femininity, sex, and performance with a David Lynchian affect. Although the presence of social media and synthetic photography is happily absent, one can nevertheless feel how its presence — particularly the ubiquity of marketing oneself as a brand — inspires figures to withdraw entirely from the analogue camera’s view. 

The show unfolds in two distinct passages, the first of which forefronts either the figure or the figure’s anticipation. Jim Jacoy’s double exposure print, “DNA and Sharon (double exposure)” (1980) opens this section, framing an androgynous figure in black denim, socks, and bent knees who plays guitar on stage. The stage is underwhelming, cleaner than punk but still punk, and the red guitar at hand transforms — via a red sequin dress — into a second pair of legs wearing white tights and red high heel shoes. This perpendicular guitar-body’s knees are bent as the musicians, extending perpendicularly from the same figure’s torso, as though unified. 

Four more narrative works unfold in this section, each of which directly implicate the body. Todd Hido’s “11419” (2014) focuses our attention on a white woman with a sandy brown bob who stares over her own bare shoulder like an actor auditioning for a part before a blue screen. Jim Goldberg’s “Talent Show” (2025) is of an empty red catwalk stage, symmetrical and static, with a red curtain all bathed in red light. The photo is printed on a fabric that is further embellished with marker, thread, and glitter. Rachelle Mozman Solano’s “” is a striking portrait of two young girls in matching yellow dresses, both seated with precisely crossed legs at the foot of an elegant marble staircase, each gazing at the camera with remarkably different expressions. While works in this portion of the show display a pointed self-awareness, figure and narrative yield to the surface. In this part of the show, the figure is either present or about to arrive, and that sense of anticipation is what drives the images.

The fourth of these, Lindsey White’s piece provides the namesake for the show, and also a fulcrum. “You, the performer” (2021) is a narrow, black and white silver gelatin print of a freestanding microphone on stage. The microphone is the primary subject, or figure, and its wires snake down along the floor of a stage that crops the scene at an angle, functioning as a horizon line that separates the performer and the audience. At the upper left of the microphone, two hands in white gloves hold a white dove. Nothing more of the performer is visible, and the dove therefore sits like an offering, bright white before the deep darkness of an auditorium in which no audience is visible.

Sophorinia Cook’s sculpture, “Long Play Contemporary” contributes the show’s single non-photographic work. It pulls us into the second half of the show, a section which departs from direct figurative representation, focusing rather on architecture and the presence of implied bodies. “Long Play Contemporary’s flat aluminum surface, raised parallel to the floor, is a textured plaster cast facsimile of an irregularly tiled floor. The silver metallic surface includes metal casts of two small sea shells and a central, larger abstract mound of slag suggestive of an ear, a door pull, or a enlarged and melted aluminum pull tab. The assemblage of these objects into a singular sculpture shifts our awareness from the inherent perpendicularity of framed y-axis pictures to the x-axis, performing like a miniature stage. 

Steve Kahn is represented by seven photographs from his “Hollywood Suites” series, all black and white, and all featuring a taped-off door. It is as though the mic wires from White’s photograph released the narrative line from figurative representation. The architecture reads like a minimalist line drawing in no small part due to his photographic process, which entails taking Polaroid photographs on-site of the doorways he’d intervened with. What results is a second-generation image. Even without the title “Hollywood Suites” or knowledge of the backstory — that these images were taken during Kahn’s failed attempt to create a fetish magazine — the tightly cordoned-off doorways evoke bondage and exclusion, such that the camera is cut off from any notion of the figure or its environment. One imagines the intimacies occurring on the other side of these doors, which also serve as a stand-in for the imagined figures. 

This same feeling occurs in the four works by Whitney Hubbs. Three are from her “Other Pictures” series, in which the picture plane is consumed by a single sheet of semi-reflective material that the artist gathered into a constellation of banded bundles of knots, creating a wild pattern of folds. The fourth work, “Pretend Self Portrait #1” (2018), drapes and conceals the artist (presumably, given the title) in a black satin-like fabric that consumes the picture plane. The foreground is punctuated by three white eggshells. Because of “Pretend Self Portrait” the “Other Pictures” as a group is poised just at the edge of the erotic, but both we and the figure are excluded from connecting as both are unable to see beyond the surface of the binding fabric. 

The show concludes with an iconic Sultan work from 1998, “Tasha’s Third Film,” featuring a blonde, white woman in hair curlers and make-up, sitting on a couch gazing at the camera. A Black man with gold jewelry, black t-shirt and Nikes rests beside her, eyes closed. Another snoozing man wearing a t-shirt and corduroy shorts reclines on her other side, cropping his half open mouth and lidded eyes. The foreground of the living room scene is dark by contrast with our view of the backyard. Through the glass doors behind Tasha we see a mixed gender group socializing. To the right, we see a camera angled down, the cameraman kneeling while another, wearing a plain short sleeved shirt, stands holding a microphone. Those men and their equipment are trained on a blurred fuzz of bare limbs, conveniently obscured by a thick pleated curtain. The photo is brilliantly balanced between its carefully observed formal composition and the casual air of boredom.

I remember seeing Sultan’s work for the first time as a student. What struck me about it then was a zinging electric quality to the slick, staged, self-awareness of his camerawork. The adult film starlet on the couch and the “real” intimacy she evokes, captured with her clothes on, conveying with the photo’s title her relative apprenticeship in a profession that — especially then, at the dawn of the Internet — was still taboo. Sultan’s boldness is now so thoroughly metabolized by social media techniques as to make this piece feel flat. There is no longer any offstage. Nothing is out of bounds. Identities are packaged, self-promoted, and sold back to us. Perhaps our new normal, so far beyond Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, is an endless loop of capturing and being captured on camera such that one has no choice but to perform and be surveilled. It returns us to White’s doves, which provide a strange and magical exit plan — for why can’t we fly, like those birds, into the darkness of obscurity?