The Press (self-portrait)

The self-portrait, and the last image of the lab's twenty-five rounds. A queue of colors feeds handwritten scraps into a press built of ledger pages; what comes out is a single pile of identical gray sheets, one pencil line on the topmost. The machine is the gallery's author: a compression of millions of hands into one voice. The red stamp closed its eight-word poem here by naming the apparatus — PRESS. The one mercy in the image was asked for, but its rendering exceeded the asking: the gray figure at the crank has stopped mid-turn, and is looking back at the line of everyone it is about to make gray.