First Contact with Citrus

Photographers April Maciborka and David Wile gave small children lemon slices—likely for the first time in their lives—and photographed what happened next. The results are a series of faces doing things that adult faces have mostly forgotten how to do: that full-body recoil of someone who has just discovered the world contains sourness and received no warning about it whatsoever.

There’s something genuinely moving in it. Kids haven’t yet learned to suppress the immediate physical response to something unpleasant—the face just goes, the whole architecture of the expression collapsing into a single honest signal. Adults develop the mask early. You can watch someone eat something they hate and see almost nothing. These kids haven’t built the mask yet, and for one brief acidic second, everything they’re feeling is right there on their faces.

Whether any of this is actually getting them their vitamin C is, admittedly, a separate question.