About Pain and Performance.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith examines human sympathy. How is it that we experience the pain of others if our own perceptions are limited to our own bodies? Smith argues that sympathy is based in an imaginative capacity to project our senses towards another person. “Though our brother is upon the rack,” he writes, there is a persistent feeling that we are there with them. The invocation of kinship in “brother” is telling. We can only imagine another person’s suffering as far as can identify with that person. To whom do we extend this “brotherhood?” Whose pain is closer to our own, and whose feels more immediate? Further, whose pain is suited to spectacle and whose enrages or offends us to see used as entertainment?

The collection featured on this site is organized around core themes of pain and performance, as they are deployed across four categories common to circus “freak shows”: swords and sword swallowing, needles and nails, extreme strength, and performers inflicting pain on another. In each case, the performers’ ability to complete these feats inspires an awe that may override sympathy. The viewer’s initial wince is assuaged by the performers’ stoic expressions or winning smiles, betraying no trace of pain. Otherwise, their faces are obscured, or their bodies are upstaged by elaborate sets and costumes. Their incredible strength or their tolerance for pain renders them superhuman, and thus other than human. While circus freak shows often featured performers and bodies that were visibly physically disabled, we call the subjects of this collection “overly-abled,” in order to highlight their difference but still call attention to the similar ways in which they are dehumanized.

The format of this collection imposes an unavoidable distance between the subject and the viewer. Whatever metaphorical gap already existed between the performers and their live audience, because of their superhuman-ness, is compounded by the fact that we are looking only at photographs. The subjects cannot stare back at us. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s notion of the “staree” replaces some of the agency that is lost to the person with an anomalous body (or the body reacting anomalously to extraordinary or painful circumstances), by highlighting how someone being stared at may respond to an other-ing gaze—they might refuse to acknowledge the intrusive eyes, or they might turn the gaze onto the starer and stare back. The static images of these people give them no opportunity to react to our viewership. As such, the responsibility falls to us to consider how we react to them. Our focus on sympathy is an attempt to restore humanity to the subjects of these images, calling not merely for a sympathetic reaction to their suffering and exploitation, but for an empathetic recognition of a kinship that has been erased by the potentially dehumanizing force of spectatorship.