Aftershocks continued in the weeks following the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Questions about radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remained unanswered. In Egypt, mass protests forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign from office and triggered a wave of social and political unrest across the Middle East. In California, many wondered about the safety risks of having two nuclear power plants so near to earthquake fault lines. While recent events undoubtedly influenced my selection of images for this project in X-TRA, these objects came into being under very different circumstances. Photographed and re-presented here, they are but a small sampling from a larger project that looks to the depiction of race and the construction of whiteness. The Profiled series asks what comes after ideologies and their aesthetic manifestations have run their course. Cast, carved, burned, and broken, these are lingering shadows of people that once lived in this world, or in the imaginations of their makers, and serve to question the very idea of progress
