Artist Statement

In my latest photo series, The Bully Pulpit, I investigate the social phenomenon of cyberbullying and the public profiles of people who attempt to bully me. The images represent my response to the hateful people who waste their time using the internet as
a weapon to get me to stop creating my work.

I photograph myself costumed like the people who’ve attempted to bully me. Finding photos online, I recreated their images using wigs, clothing, and simple prosthetics, while small imperfections mirror the fallacy that the internet will shield their identities. Finally, I overlay the parodies with transcripts of the bullying comments, almost as if I were “subtweeting” them.

My inspiration for The Bully Pulpit was the thousands of people who wrote mean-spirited comments about me in emails, tweets, Instagram posts, blogs and online comments sections when Wait Watchers was published. If I responded to them with text, the bullies would delete my words. But I realized that as an image cannot be removed from the internet, if I responded photographically then my response could never be deleted.

www.haleymorriscafiero.com