MY FELLOW PRESIDENTS

My Fellow Presidents interrogates the duality of political monuments as both physical entities and ideological symbols. Through infrared photography, I document the thermal fluctuations of abandoned presidential statues—colossal effigies whose material grandeur once embodied authority but now stand as relics in a secluded construction site in Williamsburg, Virginia.

 

These infrared images are transformed into postage stamps, a deliberate inversion of monumentality. As the smallest operational units of a nation’s symbolic postal system, these stamps’ invalid postage status mirrors the cyclical failure of political promises. Their “to be returned” designation constructs a temporal critique of democratic accountability—akin to citizens’ perpetual surveillance of leaders, forever suspended in an unresolved tense.

 

While the infrared images capture real-time temperature differentials between the monuments and their surroundings, these spectral recordings pose a radical question: Can we weigh the substance of memory using the same tools that detect a statue’s fading body heat? The stamps’ miniature scale becomes a perceptual telescope—collapsing the distance between monumental propaganda and handheld reality, between presidential legacies and the pocket-sized truths we choose to send forward.