Wearing His Face Back at Him

Shock, grief, rage—all three words lost their texture this morning. When you wake up and learn that a racist, sexist egomaniac has just been handed the most powerful office on the planet by millions of apparently rational people, language stops being adequate. You just sit there with it.

Artist Jesse Fox turned that feeling into something. Like so many women, I’m incredibly frustrated by the garbage that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth, she said. The tape—the one where he brags about grabbing women by the pussy—gave her an idea: put her friends in Trump masks that her band happened to have lying around from a music video shoot, and let them perform their fury directly back at the source. The resulting photo series, shot for Sticks & Stones, is exactly as confrontational as it sounds.

What it captures is the particular rage of watching someone who treats women’s bodies as a standing punchline get rewarded with the presidency. The fight against that kind of contempt just got harder—set back years, maybe decades, because the most powerful man in the world now wears his misogyny as a personality feature. Good luck, America, Fox said at the end. I can’t tell whether she meant it as a wish or a warning. Probably both.