The Watchers

Haley Morris-Cafiero's first monograph gathers self-portraits from her viral Wait Watchers series, in which she photographed herself in public settings while capturing the passing judgmental glances of strangers, alongside a sample of the thousands of hostile anonymous comments the images drew online.

The project began in 2010, when Morris-Cafiero set up a camera to make a self-portrait in Times Square and later noticed a man in the frame sneering at her, a fraction-of-a-second expression the camera happened to catch. She began staging further self-portraits in public and mining them for these unguarded reactions from strangers. After the Wait Watchers images circulated online starting in 2013, they drew a readership estimated in the hundreds of millions along with a flood of anonymous, often cruel, comments about her body, which the book reproduces alongside the photographs, turning the work into a study of both being watched and being judged.

Published by The Magenta Foundation with an introduction by Amanda de Cadenet and a foreword by curator Marvin Heiferman, the book was released in a regular trade edition alongside boxed and deluxe special editions.