Mary Bradbury is a collaborative work produced by Ken Marchionno and Brett Childs, employing the modeling talents of Emma Thompson and styling of Stef Contreras.

We live in a time when privacy is at a premium. At any, or perhaps every moment, we are being watched. Our information is collected and sold to anyone interested in manipulating our desires for anything from commerce to politics. We relinquish this information freely based on contracts we sign but rarely read; it’s the reason the bike you looked at yesterday pops up today, or the politics you espouse is validated in your feed. While it may sometimes seem convenient, it’s far from innocent.  

We accept these intrusions as part of contemporary society. Unless you’re completely off the grid, it’s likely your moves are being recorded.

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But you are subject to a deeper, more insidious form of surveillance. Since the dawn of civilization, the dominant fear relates to the loss of power. Authority is precarious, built on a perception of validity that is constantly under pressure. The more illegitimate the leadership, the more paranoid it becomes.

The belief that the state is under siege has been around since its inception. The leaders of Greece employed spies against their people. And there is perhaps no more notorious spy than Judas Iscariot, spying for the Romans in the take down of Jesus. In the early 1950s, the US House Un-American Activities Committee, saw a rush to villainize certain citizens as enemies of the state. And from 1956-1971, COINTELPRO, a covert arm of the FBI, was used to surveil variously feared Americans, from the KKK to Civil Rights, Environmentalists, Puerto Rican Independence, and the American Indian Movement. 

In 2001, after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the US Congress authorized the Patriot Act to unearth threats within the country. This law, replaced by the USA Freedom Act in 2015, allows surveillance of citizens suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups. This all sounds quite reasonable—give up some privacy for safety. Besides, the government is only surveilling suspicious people. But like the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, there is a group-think that skews the results, and the determination of suspicion is itself suspect.

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What if you were targeted; what if you were seen as a threat? What if the perceived threat is based on ill-advised or absurd presumptions? Mary Bradbury posits just that question.

 

The work images a young woman in her daily routine: she checks her email, watches videos, goes to work… Images taken in both her intimate setting and from a distance show her actions are being recorded. Does the corroborating evidence prove something insidious? How does knowing someone is under surveillance change the viewer’s perceptions? Do you read clues or create clues? An assumption of guilt forces a pretext that creates a sinister read.

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The well-heeled saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it” is turned on its head. “I’ll see it when I believe it” is perhaps the more apt truism.