Haley Morris-Cafiero | Performer - Artist

Haley Morris-Cafiero with face taped in a distorted expression to achieve a high hardworking score in her AI bias performance project

what does an ideal employee look like

What Does an Ideal Employee Look Like? employs humour, performance and artificial intelligence (AI) to visualise the biases hidden in algorithms that power employment applicant assessment software used by many major corporations. Applicants "interview" with the software as it analyses their physical features and provides a score of desirable employee personality characteristics. The software's algorithms are biased and assess potential applicants with large eyes as being “more honest” or those with high cheekbones as “better leaders”.

Traits include agreeableness, openness, or extraversion, and are further broken down into subcategories such as leadership skills, competitiveness, amongst others. Once I have achieved the highest score for each category, I freeze my face by securing its position with tape. I then capture the result as a parody workplace headshot portrait. The resulting images depict a distorted face that is initially comical in appearance and transitions to tragic when the viewer realises the backstory of the still and moving images.

To challenge the common corporate use of this discriminatory software, I collaborated with a computer scientist to recreate the AI driven software, enabling me to do performances of job interviews while I manipulate my face to achieve high ideal employee personality scores. As I change the shape of my face and its components, the videos document changing scores as the software assesses me for one of twenty personality traits that are ideal for employers.

To further impact the viewer on the biases of the software, the exhibition includes laptops with the AI driven interview software on plinths to allow visitors to have their faces assessed by the software. This interactive element will allow the viewer to experience the biases embedded in the software and realise that they are being impacted by its use by businesses.

Haley Morris-Cafiero manipulating her face during AI interview performance for High Hardworking score

Buoyant Force

Buoyant Force is a series of performative photographs that visualise the empowerment of people who overcame negativity about their physical appearance. The interpretations depicted in this work were developed from stories shared by people who were inspired by the Wait Watchers images to feel empowered by their bodies. The series was created through collaboration with twenty empowered people who stories were used to create the performances and costumes for the image.

In this series, the portrayals challenge the common belief that a corpulent body cannot be graceful. My performances of powerful and graceful gestures while underwater subvert the trope that a female underwater is frail and hollow. This disobedient act echoes the empowerment felt by the collaborators who overcame challenges with their body image.

One of the subversive tools I employed in the Buoyant Force series was the underwater setting for the images. I seized the trope of the female body in water away from the frail, submissive woman. This archetype appears in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the character Ophelia who descends into madness and drowns in a brook after Hamlet, her lover, verbally abuses her and kills her father by mistake. The image of Ophelia succumbing to water and melting like dew became the symbol for female weakness and delicacy in art and literature.

The underwater setting for the Buoyant Force performances also provided a conceptual layer as the laws of hydrodynamics state the shape of the body does not determine its ability to float. Based on these laws, I propose that the underwater space is an inclusive one where buoyancy—the ability to float—is determined by body density, and not by body mass or shape. My use of the underwater space to perform graceful gestures challenges society’s female body standards by providing a setting that accentuates my transgression as an overweight body defying gravity.

The collaborative methodology was employed in the Buoyant Force series to give agency to the collaborators and visualise the empowerment of their oppressed bodies. Their empowerment subverts the power that made their bodies docile and were recuperated by seeing the Wait Watchers images. Each collaborator completed a questionnaire that queried their experience of seeing the Wait Watchers images and visual indicators of joy and inspiration.

Haley Morris-Cafiero floating underwater in a red dress and swimming cap, reminiscent of a vintage cartoon character for the Boyant Force series

the bully pulpit

The Bully Pulpit is a visual response to cyberbullies who criticised my body and physical appearance, one that is marginalised by Western beauty standards. The images employ subversive tactics of weaponizing the tools utilised by the cyberbullies to spread hate and perpetuate Western beauty standards. When Wait Watchers went viral to an audience of over 300 million followers, the online disciplinary gaze was directed at me in the form of approximately four thousand five hundred emails, thousands of social media comments and blogs that criticised my body and overall appearance.

The online comments and other cyber delivered messages are the new form of Michel Foucault’s disciplinary gaze that aims to punish those who do not fit within its beauty standards. Unlike the public gaze that is temporal and ephemeral, the online comment exists for public view, sharing and commenting in perpetuity.

Once the project was in the public domain, the bullying messages and websites can be divided into three categories: declarations of my overall unattractiveness, condemnations of my body weight or assumptions about my ableness based on the size of my body. The messages were typically short, poorly written and contained words that were extremely abusive and reprimanding. The emails and social media comments were generally the same length, and the author of the email was generally anonymous while the social media comment connected to the online profile of its author.

There is significant research published on the analysis of social media as a panopticon site for a gaze that is used to surveil people’s opinions and locations. However, I identify a gap in the literature equating criticising content of bullying emails, derogatory social media comments and blog content as a form of the disciplinary gaze on bodies.

For each image in The Bully Pulpit series, I recreated the likeness of the bully by wearing the wig and clothing that matched their profile photograph. In instances when the bully was wearing an item of clothing with a specific graphic, I procured the identical item to wear in their photograph. As an example, for “Speedo Man,” I located the speedo the bully was wearing in his profile photograph and acquired it for the image. The images in The Bully Pulpit series align with Philip Auslander’s definition of a theatrical performance document as the performances were constructed to be photographed.

I embodied humour by utilising absurdly unrealistic prosthetics with exaggerated features and poor props in each image. My goal was to create a likeness that was very close to the bullies’ profile but not an exact facsimile of their features. If I had created a facsimile of the bullies’ profile photograph, the viewers’ attention would be spent identifying the bullies. This would have taken away from my goal of reversing the weaponization of humour as a form of social control by making the bullies the subject of the joke.

Performative methodologies are essential to The Bully Pulpit series. In order to create a convincing representation of the bullies, I channelled the bullies through my performance. Each bully’s performance was created from my study of their mannerisms and body language portrayed in their public profile. My channelling and performances of the bully’s idiosyncrasies give authenticity to my “becoming” them for the photograph thus highlighting the humorous elements of the photograph.

Haley Morris-Cafiero standing in a kiddie pool wearing a Speedo and statement shirt for The Bully Pulpit series, embodying the appearance of an online harasser

Wait Watchers

The Wait Watchers series employs performative photography to illuminate the experience of my marginalised body engaging with what can be considered a disciplinary gaze in public. Performances of everyday, mundane activities are delivered in public view to provide a site for the gaze of the passerby. It is not known what the people in the photographs are thinking or reacting to. However, the gaze captured in the photographs can be interpreted as critical by one viewer and noncritical by another.

For each image, I position my performances in a location where my visibility traps me in a disciplinary gaze. In his lecture, “The Split Between the Eye and Gaze,” Jacques Lacan describes how a viewer’s response to an image is informed by their subjective gaze. This theory supports my intention for the viewer to decode what is happening in the image for themselves. I do not communicate what I believe is the meaning behind the passersby’s’ actions in the image. I present the unaltered image for the viewer to determine what is meant behind the actions in the photograph. The viewer’s subconscious beliefs are imbedded in their analysis of the image, and they determine what is happening in the action they are witnessing.

The mundane performances in Wait Watchers aim to upend the corrective gaze that society has established for viewing and critiquing the female body. For each body of work, I position my performances in a location where my visibility traps me in a disciplinary gaze. By presenting these performances to the world, I am wilfully transgressing the rules of society that govern my body and disobeying attempts to marginalise me and silence my voice.

The photographs in the Wait Watchers series are situated as a hybrid of constructed, theatrical performed photographs intersecting with documentary images. The photographs depict my performances of mundane acts, but they also serve as evidentiary documents of the stranger’s gaze as they pass me performing in public. The constructed scene juxtaposed with a factual event within one frame provides an ambiguity that adds complexity to the images. Lucy Soutter describes the ambiguous use of fictive documentary and hybrid genres as strategies employed in contemporary photographic practices.

Haley Morris-Cafiero standing near two police officers during a public performance for the Wait Watchers series, capturing unscripted responses

Weight Bearing

Imagine that you are trying to push a ball into a square hole. When you push the ball towards the hole, it moves in a different direction. After multiple tries, the ball is finally in the opening of the hole, but you discover that the hole is too small. This is how I would describe my attempt to control my body when I suffered from an undiagnosed eating disorder almost 30 years ago.

The photographic series Weight Bearing is a series of self-portrait photographs that depict the invisible feelings that I associate with my experience of trying to control my body’s size and force myself to fit within society’s ideal body image. Using tropes that are associated with a variety of everyday situations and inspired by the reports increased eating disorder support requests during the lockdown, I hope the images help those who are struggling with an eating disorder find their voice to seek help.

Haley Morris-Cafiero seated alone in a dark auditorium for the Weight Bearing series, reflecting themes of presence, visibility, and emotional weight

About

Part performer, part artist, part provocateur, Haley Morris-Cafiero uses her photography as an activist voice to fight discrimination and social invisibility. Morris-Cafiero’s works have been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world and have been featured in numerous publications including Le Monde, New York Times and Salon. Born in Atlanta, Morris-Cafiero is a graduate of the University of North Florida, where she earned a BA in Photography and a BFA in Ceramics in 1999. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2014, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (longlist) in 2021, and shortlisted for the 2025 BMW Art Makers Award, Morris-Cafiero holds a MFA from the University of Arizona in Art. The Magenta Foundation published her monograph, The Watchers, in 2015, and Fall Line Press published her second, The Bully Pulpit, in 2019. Morris-Cafiero’s work is included in the 2021 publication Photography – A Feminist History by Emma Lewis published by Tate. She is represented by TJ Boulting Gallery in London and is an Associate Professor and Subject Leader of Visual Arts at De Montfort University.
Morris-Cafiero earned her practice-based PhD from Westminster University in 2023.

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