Eye on Nails #2 1940

Nathan Lerner's 'Eye on Nails #2' is a photograph that messes with your head in the best way possible. It’s like he's saying, "Here’s a thing, but what IS it, really?" The high contrast gives a tactile quality, like you could reach out and touch it, but what would you feel? The smooth skin of an eye? Or the sharp points of the nails? That one eye peeps through a field of nails or maybe shadows. The nails create a pattern, almost like scales, that both obscures and reveals. Look at the way the light catches the edge of the nail, how the shadows cast are all going the same way, this is very carefully composed. Are we looking at protection or threat? Lerner reminds me a little of Man Ray, both playing with photography to make us question what we see, making the familiar strange and new. In the end, it’s not about answers, but about the questions the image provokes.