Self Eyes. A selfie is a picture of a person. Look more closely and it is also a picture of a room. The cornea is a wet, curved mirror, and at the resolution our cameras now capture, the world reflected in someone's eye is legible. Furniture, windows, the photographer, the screen of the phone, the street outside. None of this was the subject of the photograph. All of it was photographed anyway.

I started this project because I wanted to see whether it would work. It worked too easily. With a high-resolution image and a slow zoom into the eye, the reflection emerges — a tiny, upside-down photograph that nobody composed, that nobody intended, that nobody knew was being taken. The eye does not curate. It records what it is pointed at.

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The historical photographs are perhaps the strangest part. There are daguerreotypes from the 1840s in archival collections where you can zoom into the sitter's eye and see the curtains of the studio. There are Depression-era portraits in which the photographer is visible in the reflection — small, hunched, holding a Speed Graphic. The leakage is not a recent problem. It is a property of eyes and lenses, and it has been quietly happening since photography began. We are only now in possession of screens that show us what was already in the file.

This means the work spans a century and a half without changing in any material way. A Brady portrait from 1860 leaks the same kind of information a phone selfie leaks today: who was in the room, what the room looked like, where the windows were. The technology of seeing has accelerated. The technology of being seen has not changed at all.

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I would like a viewer to leave this work with a small adjustment in how they look at photographs of people. Not paranoia. Not a decision to delete anything. Just a noticing — that the world looks back at us through every surface that can hold a reflection, that the eye is the most candid camera anyone has ever owned, and that for as long as we have been photographing each other, we have been photographing far more than that.

There is something quiet about it. The reflections are small. They are not dramatic. Most of them are mundane — a window, a hallway, a tripod, a hand. There is no drama, but they did exist.