Staring Back and Forth: The Photographs of Kevin Connolly

Kevin Connolly was born without legs (an impairment called sporadic birth defect) and has taken about 32,000 photographs of people staring at him, assembled as The Rolling Exhibition (2007). Connolly’s photographs are about staring, which disability studies theorist, Garland-Thomson, sees as inherent in photography of disabled people, but he is behind the camera. “You know, if I see someone that doesn’t look, you know, looks particularly strange on the street I’m gonna stare,” Connolly said. “I’m not above that by any means.” Connolly, with his camera, stares and stares back. His photographs disrupt a binary of starer versus staree. Those who stare at him become the subjects, caught in their acts, captured on film. Connolly, a graduate of Montana State University, an X-Games medalist, an extreme skier, has worked as a writer and a graphic designer. He has traveled the world, getting around cities on a longboard, which is a longer, more flexible version of a skateboard, which he prefers to a wheelchair. He wears a boot, or a leather seat with a rubber sole, which resembles a large slipper and which he calls “moccasin pants.” His images come from the Pacific Rim, Asia, Bosnia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe, for a total of 31 countries. The portraits prove that staring is a multi-cultural phenomenon and act and that starers come from all ethnicities and all walks of life. Being stared at and being photographed because of his unique body inspired Connolly to take his own photographs and to document the experience of staring, from the receiving end. The stare embodies viewer’s questions and assumptions, which the photographs elicit in their subjects’ returned, puzzled gazes. “People are curious,” says Connolly, who says that people all over the world invent stories about him, where he came from, and what he’s doing. People tend to invent and share their own narratives about him. While traveling, Connolly has been mistaken for a holy man, a member of a carnival act, and an Iraq War veteran. The stare embodies questions Connolly receives, such as “Was it disease?,” “Was it a birth defect?,” and “Was it a landmine?”