Rolls & Tubes

The commodification of the everyday has become a running theme of the This self-portrait is a cog in a much larger body of work done over the last year by four friends, separately, examining the history of photography and our role in it. The COVID-19 pandemic. Having made homebodies of us all, COVID-19 has created absurd rolling shortages of flour, hair dye, coins, and toilet paper. This was the genesis of our ongoing work as the Rolls & Tubes Collective. In this work, we have reinterpreted images from the canon of photographic history, employing toilet paper as our primary compositional device. Finding levity in the unprecedented sorrow brought about by the pandemic was an exceptional gift for us. Taken as a whole, the work presents a timely questioning of omissions in the history of photography. The work is broad and offers multiple modalities for recontextualizing photographic images, from quotation to paraphrase; from homage to good roasting. The work is reflective of right now, not just in the repurposing of this everyday commodity, but in utilizing visual history to examine the contemporary moment.