Pressing Matters stages my wife on a chaise in our shared print studio, and me crowding over her with a steaming tacking iron in hand, easing the wrinkles from her forehead. She's the worrier in the marriage. I'm not — more technical, more action-oriented, less prone to spinning out. That asymmetry is the engine of the image. Referencing Ovid's Pygmalion — a man shaping a woman toward his own idea of her. Beauty and fashion culture, aided by photography, has run the same play for a century now: smooth, glowing, unlined skin as the summary of a woman's worth. I don't buy any of it, philosophically. And still — I see her forehead wrinkle and my first instinct is to intervene in some way. So the iron is doing several jobs: Preservation, Soothing, Smoothing, Erasure. It's unclear whose interest is actually being served — hers, or the discomfort her worry produces in me. She's flat on the chaise, passive, receiving. I'm upright, working the tool, blocking her from the lens and from getting up. Smoothing her over. Possibly smoothing something out of her that was hers to keep all along. I'm simultaneously author and laborer. An auteur at best, busy idiot at worst. Here, a service provider. She's the one being attended to, cared for, worked on — passively managed, the recipient of my efforts. She says I'm the worrier.
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