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Dini Parayitam's avatar

Alice Gribbin's essay makes art feel like something I can simply meet—no pretense, no academic scaffolding, just my lived experience, my senses, my eyes. She reminds me that engagement itself is enough, that I don't need permission or authority to have a relationship with what I see. Her argument feels both revelatory and inevitable, as if she's articulating something so fundamentally true that it's been waiting just beneath the surface of our conversations about art. Art isn't a puzzle to be solved or a text to be decoded, but a living experience to be encountered with full attention and open perception.

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Christopher Booth's avatar

This essay inspires and reassures in equal measure. In 2017, I abandoned an MA in photography at a highly-regarded college. Everything, I was told, was power swaddled in discourse. My male gaze, and every other datum of myself, was ipso facto suspect. No amount of sackcloth and ashes would be sufficient. I didn't pick up a camera again until last summer. For the previous years, taking pictures had been re-upsetting, a shutter release for unhappy memories.

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