Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

92 STARERS AND STAREES
Figure 7.7. Kevin Connolly, “Woman and Children; Sarajevo, Bosnia.”
such curiosity inappropriate, Connolly seems to relish the opportunity to help
them imagine his life as livable and fully human.
As Kevin Connolly’s remarkable archive of starers demonstrates, the most
potentially generative staring situation is one that produces mutual interest.
Rather than turning away his starers, Connolly engages them, if nothing
else by surprising them with his camera. He moves many of them, however,
beyond the startle he catches in his viewfinder into a relation of empathetic
exchange. They begin to imagine what it is like to be him. In this way, the
narrative that staring begets can lead to the kind of empathetic identification
Walt Whitman calls for in his poetic celebration of hearty staring. Connolly
nurtures this relationship with some of his starers, perhaps out of generosity,