Smiling Faces
The first photograph I took of a smiley face is dated July 13, 2020. The current tally, three years later is 810, with probably a few dozen negatives that I haven’t scanned yet. I want to make 1,001, if only to borrow from the Tales of One Thousand Nights and a Night — to have a lot, plus one.
I have no particular affinity for the smiley face, but something starts to happen with accumulation. A story that has no single origin, that can be entered at any point, that any one person could tell. It is defiance leavened with tenderness: someone was here; someone is here. Having said that, I often laugh to myself about how stupid this whole thing is. But if being stupid were ever a reason not to do something then none of us would have been born at all!
A line from Robert Creeley's poem "First Rain" provides an apt epigraph: "[T]he human pledges/call them/‘We are here and/have been all the time.'" The smiley face is at once an arcane, crude symbol and the distillation of modern communication (texts, etc.). The constellation of shapes conveys the range of communicable human emotion. And yet, as with all interpersonal exchange, the nuances are, if not endless, then endlessly complex.
The smiley face represents the most simplistic, reduced form of the human image. Anyone can make one, and everyone probably has, much like photographs. Within the scope of this series, the distinctly personal quality of each face can be shown in the 1,001 ways that make them an important, if overlooked, part of our mark on the landscape — “The stain of love is upon the world,” as W.C. Williams wrote. The simple, crude nature of these markings provides their meaning, and conveys their singularly human origin, and guides them to a singularly human witness.