The Copier Lid Is Open and No One’s Around

Everyone who has ever been left alone near a photocopier has had the thought. Machine sitting there, lid up, not a soul in sight. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Most people think about it and walk away.

VICE called it a fashion series—wink, sure, fashion—stripped some willing participants down and sat them on the glass. What a flatbed scanner does to a human body is genuinely something: skin goes lunar and overexposed, contours flatten into something topographic, the whole thing looks both absurd and a little erotic. There’s a reason this impulse exists at all.

I’ve never done it myself. The printer at my last office was a compact HP that would have snapped in half. I file this under unfinished business.