Emile Ferris

Scream
digital photographic print
15 x 20 in.

As a child I spent a lot of time in school being punished in various ways for not paying attention. Even then I took issue with the accusation. I was definitely paying attention to what mattered to me. The school I attended was old and the cracking plaster of its walls revealed the profiles of a half dozen characters whose imagined antics always trumped the official lesson. It was from this place of desperate boredom that I learned to allow the inanimate to speak to me, to rescue me.

As a child I gave names to stains like “Scream.”

© Emile Ferris