Wearing Anger

Jesse Fox made a series called Sticks & Stones where her friends wore Trump masks and were photographed looking absolutely furious. This was 2016, when everything felt like it was collapsing and there wasn’t much you could do except stay angry. She had the masks from a music video shoot, and what the photographs showed was raw anger—not performed, just real.

In a moment like that, there’s something necessary about directness. No irony, no distance, no concept between the feeling and the image. Just women in rubber faces of someone they despised, expressing what couldn’t be expressed any other way. It was partly a warning—this is what’s coming, hard times, the same fights repeated—but mostly just an acknowledgment of what everyone was feeling.

I don’t know if it changed anything. It probably didn’t. But there was something true about it, something that mattered. Sometimes that’s all a photograph can be.