Artist Statement

I remember the first time my conscious brain registered it as a thing. I was seventeen. Mid sex. I look at my co-conspirator and watch her pupils and iris disappear completely. I was like oh fuck. She’s dying. But she didn’t die. A few months later I’m high on some really good ecstasy and my vision goes black. I can feel my eyes are still open. Maybe that’s why they call it rolling? Ok. SO I get it. It can be pleasure induced. Fast-forward a decade or so and I’m in the studio shooting and I catch a tired model with her eyes rolled back. Ok. So it’s also related to a sleep state. I ask her if she can do it again. I swear she almost rolled her eyes all the way up instantly at the mere though of me asking her to so something so absurd. It took a few tries get it perfect. But she was a trooper. I starred the images and said out loud…. One day I’m going to have a whole collection of these images. I was obsessed. I’d almost call it a fetish, but not really in any kind of sexual way. I do a little research into all the hypothesized causes of it. Deep meditative states, extreme sexual pleasure, nonverbal communication, strange mating rituals, expression of utter annoyance, and the natural relaxed state of the ocular muscles. All interesting causes and all totally unrelated… which makes me more intrigued. So I embrace the obsession and I kept shooting these images whenever I had a chance. At first, the initial reaction from almost all of my subjects was…. Whattt? Some of them would attempt it. Some would simply decline. That’s when I started to realize that not everyone could do it. For some humans it was completely impossible. And for some, it was as easy as blinking. It was a struggle for the first few years. It was awkward at times. And I’m sure that some of my subjects thought I was absolutely weird. But It had just become a part of me and how I saw the world. Fast-forward to today…. When pop culture icons, cam girls, and instagram influencers are all jumping on the hype. Everywhere I look it seems to be a thing. Everyone I ask these days is like sure, let’s go for it. This is my documentation of the evolution of the eyeroll in my immediate life for for the roughly ten years of my archive. There’s plenty more.. but I felt like this period was my strongest.

Enjoy the White Eyes.

- Duck