How do we get to know a people? How much can faces, encounters and what they make tell us about who they are?

If someone approached me with a smile elsewhere, I would immediately be on guard. I have travelled for decades, and experience has taught me certain defensive habits. More often than not, a stranger approaching me wants to sell something, ask for money, or take advantage of me as a tourist.

Uzbekistan disrupts the script.

On several occasions, older ladies, men, or teenagers approached me to ask where I come from. A smile, perhaps a photograph together, a wave, and then they leave — nothing wanted, nothing sold.

Had the Uzbeks revealed something about themselves — or something about what years of travelling had done to me?

I. The Faces I Met

I travelled during the low season as I always do. It was still snowing in Tashkent with hardly any international tourists. Uzbekistan had not yet acquired the weariness towards visitors I’d encountered in heavily touristed places — Italy and Japan, to name two.

My personal experience is just evidence of an encounter with people, not evidence about an entire nation, though. Children, vendors, older people, artisans, and people in markets. Some agreed to be photographed; others I caught going about their lives.

These were the Uzbeks I met, and I have never met friendlier people. Experience gives me impressions. Repetition turns impressions into beliefs. But when do these impressions become stereotypes?

II. The Faces They Made

How we see the Uzbeks and how the Uzbeks see themselves differ. I am always curious how local artists and artisans express what they see, feel, or imagine through their work. On the other hand, I record my experiences through a camera lens with straightforward images.

We are all familiar with the expression, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Variations of this saying include, “The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book (Ivan Turgenev, a Russian writer) and “A good sketch is better than a long speech” (sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte). So, I’ll let the pictures do the talking through Uzbek artists’ and artisans’ eyes and hands on how they see themselves.

Remember that a camera records what happened to stand before it. An artist, on the other hand, does something different: they choose what deserves to be painted. What deserves to be remembered? What, perhaps, looks sufficiently “Uzbek” to become a figurine? The faces on the street show us something of the present; the faces people create may tell us something about the past they choose to remember.

III. Faces from Another Time

The German geographer and traveller Ferdinand von Richthofen first used the term “Silk Road” in 1877 to describe the trade route between Europe and East Asia. Spanning about 6,500 kilometres, it passes through Uzbekistan. Traders used this network of routes from around 130 BC during the Han Dynasty until AD 1453, when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West.

To me, the more interesting point is that historical identity survives visually. Modern Uzbeks drive cars, use smartphones and dress much like people elsewhere. Yet artisans keep creating merchants, camel riders, bearded elders, and figures in traditional clothing.

Why? Because identity contains memory. This gives us a distinction worth developing: Who we are is partly who we remember ourselves to have been.

The Silk Road therefore isn’t merely Uzbekistan’s tourism branding or historical geography. It remains part of the country’s cultural imagination.

IV. When Identity Has No Face

People express identity through things as well as faces.

i. Bread

People rarely settle for utility alone, and in Uzbekistan, flatbread is typically stamped with intricate patterns. This practice combines practical function with artistic tradition. Piercing the flatbread prevents it from puffing while baking, ensuring an even, flat disk. The punctured dots form patterns that turn a simple daily staple into folk art. These decorations have regional identities, featuring distinct styles and motifs that serve as a cultural map of the country.

Why do people do such things? The simple answer is that making things is a way of expressing who they are.

ii. Tea

Uzbekistan’s tea-drinking history is closely tied to the Silk Road. Chayhanas, traditional teahouses, serve as community hubs where locals gather on low wooden platforms covered with rugs to converse over cups of green or black tea.

Traditionally reserved for men, modern chayhanas welcome all travellers and locals as places to relax and hear community news. They are typically located in open-air courtyards shaded by trees. People often pair tea with bread, sweets, dried fruits, or nuts.

Tea becomes conversation, hospitality, pause and companionship. Tea came from elsewhere, as so much along the Silk Road did, yet it became woven into local life.

That gives us another interesting idea: Identity is not necessarily made from things that originated with us. It is also made from things we absorb and make our own.

iii. Craft

I find handicrafts intriguing because a culture leaves fingerprints on ordinary things. Traditional skills that shape crafts are then passed from old to young; each item tells a story of the people who made it. Indeed, every new piece is living history, keeping an old way of life alive today.

V. What the Pictures Cannot Tell Me

Uzbekistan, although an Islamic country, recognises only civil marriages, and polygamy is illegal. Women’s rights are changing, perhaps not fast enough for some observers. I have noticed that figurines in Uzbekistan consistently show an exaggerated height difference between men and women. Does this observation reflect ingrained gender inequality? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I don’t really know.

Artists typically represent men wearing beards. However, I have not seen bearded men in contemporary life. Beards are common in Arabic countries, and authorities have reportedly discouraged them, deeming them alien to local culture. As a result, visitors are unlikely to see men wearing beards today.

Such observations touch on religion, politics, modernisation and cultural memory — and photographs alone cannot answer them.

The camera captures surfaces extremely well, but meaning requires interpretation, which in turn introduces the observer. When I say, “This is what Uzbeks are like,” how much belongs to Uzbekistan-and how much belongs to me, the observer? Seeing and understanding are not the same thing.

VI. When They Looked Back

I have this question: “Where are you from?” I heard it many times while travelling between Khiva and Tashkent.

At first, I didn’t think much of it — just another expression of friendliness. It was all too predictable — strangers approached, smiled, asked where I came from, and let me take a picture of them. I was curious about their faces, their clothes, and, within the time I had, a little of their way of life. I realised later that curiosity was mutual. As I tried to understand them, they were also trying to place me in their picture of the wider world.

The camera creates the illusion that observation travels in only one direction: I stand behind the lens; they become the subject. But whenever someone looked into my camera, or asked me a question, that distinction quietly disappeared. For a brief moment, there was no observer and observed, no traveller and local — only two strangers looking at one another with curiosity.

Perhaps that is one of travel’s unspoken gifts. We leave home hoping to discover other people, only to realise that, in their eyes, we are the other people too.

VII. There Is No Uzbek Face

I have taken pictures that I believe represent Uzbekistan — the faces of Uzbeks, their drawings, figurines, bread, and handmade items.

Which one contains the “real” Uzbekistan?

None and all of them.

The smiling stranger is Uzbek. So is the craftsman. So is the modern young person. So is the imaginary Silk Road merchant moulded from clay. So is the patterned loaf of bread. But none can carry an entire country.

Perhaps we never truly discover the face of another people. We collect glimpses — an encounter here, a gesture there, a painting, a loaf of bread, a cup of tea, something fashioned by hand. Gradually these fragments form a picture in our minds. But the picture remains ours as much as theirs.

Hence, understanding begins when we stop asking, “What are these people like?” and begin asking, “What have I actually seen — and what might I still be missing?”

Why should the reader care about something I happened to see in Uzbekistan? Because the essay ultimately does not teach the reader about Uzbeks. It shows how we might encounter people — to look closely, remain curious, notice what they choose to preserve, and be slow to believe that observation has become understanding. I believe this approach can travel far beyond the Silk Road.

In answering the opening question, we can only get to know a people gradually and imperfectly: through encounters, behaviour, art, objects, customs and the stories they tell about themselves. But these are just glimpses, while understanding another culture begins when we recognise that our understanding must always remain partial.

This essay is part of an ongoing series of reflections on travel and the inner life from the Silk Road in Uzbekistan.

A retired professor of radiology writing about ageing, curiosity, and the inner life. Lifelong student of attention and meaning.

Originally published at https://agewelleveryday.org on October 16, 2026.

Looking for the Uzbek Face was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I had the idea of writing a sequence of articles on movie star personas, I seriously underestimated the amount of effort and therefore time it would take. The emotional energy we put into our relationships with stars illuminates and generates all kinds of interesting psychological insights and cultural fallout. Stars that shine become like a litmus test of the times and incidental repositories of deeper needs and dreams. When I decided to split the stars by gender, it was to facilitate manageable articles for each age. It was immediately obvious that this simple strategy would open up a whole expanse of cultural context and gender critical understanding.

This article is the last in a sequence that started with Hollywood’s Golden Age and passed through the 1960s and 70s. The 1980’s heralds a long-term shift in the nature of film making. It marks the start of a golden age of television drama as alumni from Mary Tyler Moore’s pioneering approach to the creative dominance of writers sees story-an-episode vignettes, in which characters never change, morph to series long through lines with corresponding character arcs. Landmark TV shows such as Hill Street Blues (1981–87), St Elsewhere (1982–88), Northern Exposure (1990–95 ) and NYPD Blue (1993–2007) post a serious rival to film’s narrative dominance.

The distribution infrastructure changes with the demise of the final surviving classic picture houses, torn down or multi-screened. Film responds to its shrinking audience with a consolidation of the franchise exploitation begun in the 1970s with series like Death Wish and Dirty Harry. The 1980’s features franchise highlights like Back to the Future, Alien and Star Wars, middling stuff such as Superman and Mad Max, as well as stuff I tend to avoid, including Lethal Weapon and The Evil Dead. Franchises suit a shift to multiplex fodder that targets the younger ‘going out’ demographic: the maxing of horror and superhero material and endless IP exploitation of cross over entities like toys (Transformers, Lego).

Studios also start to change structurally with the demise of United Artists as an independent entity in 1980 accelerating an ongoing process of diversification, ownership changes and consolidation with other media. This dissipates the concentration of US film making in the small zone of Los Angeles known as Hollywood.

As the world changes so does the nature of stardom. The analysis of star personas after the 1970s becomes a tale of diminishing returns. Many of the movie stars that emerged in the 1980s are still working and their legacy is harder to encapsulate. Movie stars begin leading TV series and character actors anchor films. Media diversification and then digital media create a new landscape for the manufacture and maintenance of star personas in a world where movies aren’t the mother lode. It’s all very different. I’m going to finish this series with a mixed selection of post 1970’s stars who’ve captured my interest for a variety of reasons and leave it at that.

Gong Li

The 1990s was the decade when Chinese cinema had its moment on the international stage and no star is more emblematic of that then Gong Li. After the turmoil following Mao’s death in 1976, which reached a form of culmination in the Tiananmen Square protests and their violent suppression in 1989, the 1990’s sees Chinese leadership focus on economic growth and the development of international relations to facilitate it. Cultural activity is a key soft power element and so we see a paradoxical situation where Chinese film makers have a degree of critical license for works whose primary market is the international festival circuit while censorship to support robust political control is consolidated for domestic consumption. Making a film like To Live (1994), with its seething critique of the cultural revolution, would be unthinkable now and it was even banned in China on release.

To Live is the penultimate film in Gong Li’s career launching collaboration with Director Zhang Yimou that started with the luminous Red Sorghum (1988). Gong Li’s star persona defined a new form of Chinese femaleness for a generation, as mainland Chinese cinema began to modulate the strict social realism of the Mao years with increased use of historical material and symbolism. Beautiful, smart, martial arts free and of the real world, her characters tended towards an independence of spirit in a rugged enduring frame that life’s unremitting harshness could nevertheless break down in long suffering trajectories, ripe with critique of reactionary and patriarchal social structures.

One of the most complex iterations of this paradigm is Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993) in which Gong Li is one point in a magnificently tragic love triangle. The metaphorical richness of performance, in this case Peking Opera (Jingju), interweaves the essence of the all male opera form with the turbulence of twentieth century Chinese history and the emotional lives of the three protagonists. Themes of homosexuality, gender fluidity, the turmoil of the cultural revolution and suicide ran the film into a fraught relationship with Chinese censors while its critical reception in the west helped leverage Gong Li’s persona further into a global star.

Tom Cruise

The world’s most famous Scientologist is not the most versatile actor you ever saw but he manages to combine credibility and personability in a quietly devastating gallery of identifiable characters. Tom Cruise’s 24 carat world leading star persona is built on likability, so it’s a paradox that he’s such a successful movie star when so many people apparently don’t like him. If Jennifer Lawrence is a modern reinvention of the Golden Age movie star, then Tom Cruise is akin to the original transposed to the modern world. From Cruise’s point of view, one of the advantages of such a transposition, apart from hard cash, is that he has access to IP franchising, a brilliant marketing gimmick not then familiar to Golden Age Studios. A potential downside, in our modern media saturated world, is the lack of historic studio PR machines to occlude his personal beliefs and relationships from the public eye.

In persona terms, the Golden Age star that Cruise most resembles is Gary Cooper, an actor who started out as a stunt rider while Cruise sometimes appears to be heading in the opposite direction. Cooper had a reputation as ‘the strong silent type’, but his performances in films like A Farewell to Arms (1932), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and High Noon (1952) belie that. Cooper, like Cruise, was hard working, prolific and had to be the movie’s unambiguous hero, and he shares with Cruise a willingness to be flawed and vulnerable. In action scenes, for example in the Top Gun movies and both the Reacher and MI franchises, Cruise is often shown hesitating, evaluating and considering alternatives, which is the basic plot tic of High Noon.

This intoxicating mix of the self-consciously heroic and shades of weakness makes both Cooper and Cruise’s personas deeply relatable, even in extraordinary situations, and gives them credible access to a choice of roles across genres. For Cruise, you see this tension mainlined in a range of parts from A Few Good Men (1992) to Jerry Maguire (1996) and from Born on the Fourth of July (1989) to War of the Worlds (2005). Cruise is clever in periodically inverting his star persona by finding traces of humanity in outwardly obnoxious characters, beginning with Lestat in Interview with the Vampire (1994), later on in Tropic Thunder (2008) and currently in Digger (2026). The most accomplished excursion of this type is undoubtedly the dubious motivational speaker Frank Mackey in the ensemble cast of Magnolia (1999), one of the twentieth century’s subtlest prescient movies. Simplistically, Mackey is a prototype Andrew Tate but Cruise strips that back to a self-hating core of confusion about masculine norms in an excoriating performance that tears open the curtain on the manufacture and maintenance of the star persona itself.

Debra Winger

Back in her 1980’s heyday, I was so fond of Debra Winger that I couldn’t bear to watch Terms of Endearment (1983) all the way through. Shadowlands (1993), in which Winger plays CS Lewis’s later life wife, Joy Davidman, was similarly problematic. In some esoteric way, Debra Winger’s screen persona acts as a crucible for the human condition. On screen, she’s magnetic and you can’t help but be drawn in. Her breakthrough role in Urban Cowboy (1980) and her global star launch as Paula in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) are both characters from solid ‘blue collar’ backgrounds mixed with a universal sense of human feeling.

In 2002, Rosanna Arquette made a documentary called Searching for Debra Winger, featuring an extensive interview with Winger in which she discusses her decision to stop acting in 1995, thereby answering the question on my and many other lips: ‘what happened to Debra Winger’. There was always something awkward about Winger’s persona. She was never going to be satisfied playing feisty romantic comedy fodder in reruns of Legal Eagles (1986) despite an obvious aptitude.

It seems fitting then that Winger should find critical equivocation in a cautionary tale about restless spirits by starring in Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990). The narrative coherence of this strangely ineffectual movie follows the same path at its American traveller protagonists, Port and Kit Moresby, played by John Malkovich and Winger. Starting off cool and confident but unsettled in a search for something more, they disastrously lose their way in unfamiliar territory and end up dead and mad respectively. Ultimately, Winger is too savvy for The Sheltering Sky to be a metaphor for her star persona journey. Nevertheless, I feel melancholic contemplating the lost opportunity of Winger’s persona; an exceptional talent within an individual who deeply resented the star rigmarole that came with it.

Morgan Freeman

Gravitas is probably the best single word description for the persona of an actor who’s played God, Nelson Mandela and the President of the United States twice. It feels like Morgan Freeman was born middle-aged and then got slowly older. His star persona takes the form of the ultimate elder but one which is always laced with a heavy dose of wisdom. Freeman was already in his fifties when he finally achieved his movie star breakthrough in the late 1980s with contrasting Oscar nominated roles as a violent pimp in the lesser known Street Smart (1987) and the obliging chauffeur Hoge in huge commercial success Driving Miss Daisy (1989).

Only James Earl Jones can compete with Freeman in the voice department, with both sharing a reverberating base tone that effortlessly commands attention. It’s only fitting that Freeman is the narrative voice of ‘the world’s favourite movie’ The Shawshank Redemption (1994): “Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can’t even imagine”. Red in Shawshank is a role at the boundary of a key component of Freeman’s elder persona: the tipping point at which world-weary cynicism calcifies into obdurance and irrelevance. This state requires a lingering potential for new thinking and change, a tension born of possibilities that may or may not be taken, that may be seized and still fail. Its last chance nature is the root of Freeman’s urgent influence in major films of this period in his career, such as Unforgiven (1992) and Seven (1995). Freeman finally won an Oscar for Million Dollar Baby (2004), one of the final examples of this incongruity and a movie directed, along with Unforgiven, by Clint Eastwood, a film maker with a sharp eye for the dramatic complexity of ageing.

As time wears on, Freeman’s roles settle for age’s venerable certainties, for example, a jovial, politics-light Nelson Mandela in Invictus (2009), Lucius Fox in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Allan Trumball in the Fallen IP and, of course, God in Bruce and Evan Almighty. The staid and somewhat stereotypical treatment of race was a criticism levelled at Driving Miss Daisy, particularly for a story set in Georgia from the 1950s to 1970s. Yet one of the fascinating aspects of Freeman’s later gallery of revered seniors is how his persona dallies with a post-race identity, through a form of natural authority, in a way that the personas of younger black heavyweight stars, such as Samuel L Jackson and Denzel Washington, do not. Despite siding with slavers, Stephen from Django Unchained (2012) is a kind of anti-Hoge and it’s hard to imagine Freeman taking on a role like rap mogul David King in Highest 2 Lowest (2025) even twenty years ago. That Freeman remains beyond reproach, even for Driving Miss Daisy, is a measure of how the ‘universal’ aspects of his persona continue to be rooted in a deeply moral humanity.

Winona Ryder

Winona Ryder has become synonymous with the ‘flaky but determined mom’ character Joyce Byers in the Netflix ‘monster’ hit Stranger Things (2016–2025) but her movie star persona is of late 1980’s vintage. Her ability to embody a gentle form of existential teenage angst catapulted her to fame in a string of standout movies including Beetlejuice (1988), Heathers (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Mermaids (1990). The 1990s saw Ryder turn to more earnest material including The Age of Innocence (1993), Little Women (1994), and Girl, Interrupted (1999).

In a way, Joyce Byers is a return to the goth stylings of Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice and, who knows, the wild success of Stranger Things may have played a role in Beetlejuice’s long delayed sequel in 2024. Ryder’s star persona is based on the coolness and sexual appeal of the ‘cute’ female outsider. Joyce Byers is barely hanging on, living hand to mouth in a run-down shack with her two troubled sons. She’s a person on the fringes who the community either distrust or think is mentally ill. Although the writers are careful not to compromise her agency, Byers ends up being irresistible to community hunk, Police Chief Jim Hopper. Hence, the fierce resolve to protect and redeem her metaphysically compromised son Will has to be mixed with an essential vulnerability.

It’s a moral tweak to the formula we see in Heathers in which Ryder’s character Veronica is both complicit in a shocking descent into cruelty and delinquency, shrewdly resilient to her psycho boyfriend’s schemes, but also retains a form of innocence, or at least gullibility, which enables the black comedy to function. Ultimately, Winona Ryder’s star persona is built from a knowing naivety of a similar kind to that which powered Marilyn Monroe’s, only in a late twentieth century post-punk disguise.

Denzel Washington

The Batman movies, with their increasing harshness, are starting to make the following observation themselves, but if you take the cartoon tomfoolery out of the Dark Knight’s IP then you’re basically left with Death Wish (1974), Michael Winner’s dreadful peon to vigilante violence starring Charles Bronson. For those with a nostalgic yearning for such reactionary tosh then it remerges in unreconstructed form in The Equalizer, first a TV series with Edward Woodward in the 1980s and recently a movie franchise from 2014 onwards starring Denzel Washington, before being repackaged as a TV series again in the 2020s. With an irony common in movies where an action hero ‘helps’ the disadvantaged and downtrodden, The Equalizer showcases a smug compassionless side to Washington’s persona in the same way certain Batmen (Keaton, Bale, Affleck) relish pain inducing violence.

Washington’s prodigious talent and beauty have helped him ferment a distinctive Black masculine movie persona that’s both aware of racial injustice and uncompromising in facing it down, while also examining the complexities and compromises inherent in such a human condition. Washington has played bad men (Training Day, 2001), morally ambiguous characters (American Gangster, 2007) and flawed people (Roman J. Israel, Esq., 2017) but nevertheless his persona has a kind of Teflon quality by which integrity always shines through.

For me, Washington is most convincing when he’s foregrounding righteous smartass-ery while skating on thin ice, as in Philadelphia (1993) and Flight (2012), or channelling the ‘salt of the earth’, world weary resistance you see in Remember the Titans (2000) and Unstoppable (2010). There’s no doubt Washington is scintillating in heroic biopics like Malcolm X (1992) and The Hurricane (1999), but he has an uncanny ability to illuminate the lives of ‘ordinary’ characters making both the prosaic and miraculous events of their lives into epic storytelling.

Jennifer Lawrence

Like a love child of Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Lawrence’s star persona is a potent force of nature combining Golden Age allure with the subtlety and complexity of modern acting nous. When a star breaks through strongly in a particular role, it’s instructive to look at the resonances in that situation. In Winter’s Bone (2010), qualities of resilience, desperation and vulnerability reverberate as Lawrence channels both a child out of her depth and a precocious by circumstance survivor. These qualities, in more marketable form, are the cornerstone of Lawrence’s appeal as Mystique in the X-Men reboot (2011–2016) and Katniss in The Hunger Games franchise (2012–2015 & 2026).

Her three-film partnership with director David O Russell enabled the Lawrence star persona to grow into something more complex and luminous, particularly her Oscar winning turn in Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Much as I enjoyed her nuanced performance of the psychologically off kilter Tiffany in Silver Linings, it’s the gorgeously misaligned morality of Rosalyn in her second Russell collaboration, American Hustle (2013), that really grabs the eye. Lawrence’s all-in persona is beautifully deployed in this masterpiece of delusional thinking. Many performers would struggle to eliminate a level of subliminal judgement for such a character, but Lawrence pulls Rosalyn to her breast in a close embrace making Irving’s (Christian Bale) loose cannon wife impossible to like but also difficult to fully dislike: “you’re welcome”.

No consideration of Lawrence’s persona is complete without a sensual assault from her Marmite movie, Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017). Like the savoury spread that ‘you either hate or love’, mother! is salty, dark and very sticky. I saw it on its initial release with my daughter and son and when the lights came up in the cinema, we just looked at each other dumbstruck. Looking back in reflection, the strongest image from the movie is Lawrence waking up on the bed in that perfect house shimmering with the tension of new life, beginnings and ends filled with fear and hope. The allegorical framing of mother! is not subtle, although the photographic and art direction execution are astonishing. If there’s one actor you could rely upon to represent the elemental joy and suffering of mother earth and, beyond that, the cruelty and magnificence inherent in the state of motherhood itself, it would be Jennifer Lawrence.

Johnny Depp

Back in 1990, I vividly remember one of my friends, having just seen Edward Scissorhands (1990), squealing “a star is born” in pure giddy excitement at the consummate launch of Johnny Depp’s movie star persona. For the first decade after Scissorhands, Depp exuded sheer glamour and therein lies the stress at the heart of his appeal. In the first article in this series, in which I drew an arbitrary distinction between the idea of an actor and a star, I described Johnny Depp as ‘an actor trapped in the persona of a star’. One instinctively feels Depp recoil at the notion of his stardom, as if unadulterated adulation of his transcendental star quality actively disgusts him. It’s a curious quality because it’s not as if modesty and humility otherwise manifest in a noticeable way.

For that first decade Depp demonstrated immense skill in resolving that stress through brilliant and bankable performances in films such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Ed Wood (1994), Donnie Brasco (1997), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), one of my favourite Depp performances in The Ninth Gate (1999) and as the impossibly cool and gorgeous Roux in Chocolat (2000). Male movie stars can have a significant advantage over women as they age, with stars such as Tom Hanks, Harvey Keitel and Clint Eastwood growing in persona stature and sometimes giving richer performances. Although only sixty-three, this doesn’t appear to be the case for Depp. If anything, Depp’s performance persona has shrivelled in comparison with its earlier glories and, for me, the rot begins with Depp’s greatest commercial success playing Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) and its fifteen years of sequels.

To my mind, Jack Sparrow is the beginning of the end of Depp’s apparent balancing of the serious and strenuous demands of acting with the indulgence and perceived frivolity of stardom. Of course, Depp still turns it on for enthralling performances in The Libertine (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Public Enemies (2009) and a tour de force as ‘Whitey’ Bulger in Black Mass (2015). These high points are increasingly jostling with lesser fare such as thriller schlock The Tourist (2010) alongside ‘wacky’ characters such as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and a Michael Jackson like Willy Wonka in the same director’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). The Lone Ranger (2013), Transcendence (2014) and Mortdecai (2015) continue the downward trend.

Depp’s libel cases against The Sun and his ex-wife Amber Heard between 2018 and 2020, his resulting resignation from the Fantastic Beast’s franchise and the public reaction to these events appear to have evaporated what was left of Depp’s original star persona. However, since that period, through his own production company, Depp has embarked on a series of intriguing low profile independent projects including a French language film Jeanne du Barry (2023) and Minamata (2020), based on events in the production of a cause celebre photographic essay by W Eugene Smith, played by Depp. It begs the question what might come next from such an extraordinary talent and, more fundamentally, is the idea of a movie star fit for any creative purpose anymore.

List: A Star is Born | Curated by Storyhog | Medium

A Star is Born: Quo Vadis in a Changing World was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is a particular moment that sometimes happens when I look at an artwork.

I am looking at something and I haven’t decided what I think about it yet. Maybe something catches my attention. Maybe something bothers me. Maybe I simply need more time with it.

Then I read the text beside it.

And suddenly, I know what I am looking at. I know what it is about, where the artist came from, and what I am supposed to notice.

Sometimes that helps. And sometimes I feel like something has just been taken away from me.

I noticed this difference while looking through an artist’s portfolio some time ago. There were many images, and I was moving through them quite quickly. Nothing was really making me stop. Then I read the artist’s statement. There was an idea in it that connected with something I had already been curious about, and that small connection was enough to make me go back. I looked at the images again, this time more slowly.

The work hadn’t changed. But my way of entering it had.

The text had not told me what I was supposed to see. It had simply given me a reason to look again. Someone else could have read exactly the same words and felt nothing.

That made me wonder whether context is really the problem. Maybe the question is not whether we should explain an artwork, but what the explanation leaves open after it has been given. There is a difference between being given a way into a work and being given the answer before we have had the chance to look for one.

I have experienced both. Sometimes an explanation makes me more curious. I read something, return to the work, and suddenly notice a detail I had passed over before. Other times, I read the explanation and feel my mind becoming strangely fixed. Nothing dramatic happens. I don’t necessarily dislike the text. I simply stop exploring.

And the strange thing is that I often don’t remember those works very well afterwards.

There have certainly been artworks that, looking back, feel like good examples of poorly timed or overly directive explanation. But I cannot clearly remember them anymore, at least not with enough detail or strength to describe the experience now. I wonder if that is part of the point. Perhaps I don’t remember them because there was so little left for me to do.

This doesn’t mean that an artwork should always be mysterious. Some works are immediate and stay with us. Some are beautiful without asking us to search for anything. Others need context. Sometimes a work comes from a historical, political, or personal situation that we simply cannot understand without knowing something about it.

Context can open a door. But it can also quietly close one.

Maybe the difference is not how much information we receive, but what that information does to our position as viewers.

When we encounter something, we don’t arrive empty. We bring our memories, experiences, expectations, associations, and questions with us. Something in a work might remind us of a place, a person, or a feeling that has nothing to do with what the artist originally had in mind. Sometimes that unexpected connection is exactly what makes us stay.

None of this was necessarily placed there by the artist. It happened in the encounter, and that encounter is part of what interests me about art. The artist can begin with a very specific thought, while the viewer arrives from somewhere else. The artwork sits between them, and what happens there cannot always be completely controlled.

This is also why I have never been particularly interested in making an audience arrive at one predetermined conclusion. Even when I know where I want a project to lead, I find something more interesting in leaving a little space for the person experiencing it. Not because I want them to misunderstand it, and not because I think the artist’s intention doesn’t matter, but because the experience can become more interesting when the viewer has something to do inside it.

That might be something small: noticing a detail, making a connection, questioning something, or bringing a memory of their own.

I remember this from working on my own projects as well. Sometimes, while making something, I would become much more interested in the path than in making sure the final result communicated exactly what I had imagined. The finished piece could carry a certain idea, but what mattered to me was what might happen when someone else entered it. Maybe they would think about something from their own life, make a connection I hadn’t expected, or leave with a question that wasn’t even the one I started with.

That never felt like losing control of the work. It felt like the work had become bigger than the conclusion I had originally imagined.

And perhaps this is where explanation becomes more complicated. An artist can absolutely guide us. In fact, sometimes they need to. There are situations where the purpose of a work is very specific. A campaign, a commission, a public project, and even an artwork can have a particular outcome in mind. Guidance itself is not the problem.

What interests me is what happens when the viewer is not only moved toward the destination, but has some part in getting there. There is a difference between being led somewhere and arriving there yourself. The destination might even be the same. The experience isn’t.

Maybe that is why a small discovery can sometimes stay with us more strongly than a complete explanation. There is a particular feeling in realizing something yourself. You were not simply told. You noticed it, connected it, and became part of the process.

I don’t think this is a formula for making art memorable. But participation seems to matter. It gives the viewer a sense that something happened between them and the work, rather than simply being delivered to them.

This makes me think differently about artist statements, wall texts, titles, and all the language we place around art. I don’t think they need to disappear. In fact, some of the most useful information can be the thing that finally allows us to see a work.

But perhaps the best kind of explanation does not try to finish the experience for us. It says something about where the artist is coming from without deciding where we have to arrive. It offers context without turning context into a conclusion. It can be an invitation rather than an instruction.

A bridge helps us cross.

A frame tells us where to look.

Sometimes context can be a bridge. Sometimes it becomes a frame, and perhaps the difference is more subtle than we think. It may not even be something the artist can completely control. The same explanation that opens a work for one person might close it for another. The same sentence might give one viewer a reason to return and make another feel that there is nothing left to discover.

We all enter differently.

So I don’t think the answer is to explain less. Or to explain more. Maybe it is to leave something unfinished, not necessarily the artwork itself, but the experience of it. To leave enough space for another person to enter with their own history, their own questions, and their own way of seeing.

Because perhaps what stays with us is not always what an artwork told us. Sometimes it is the feeling that, for a moment, we found something ourselves.

And maybe that is the part that is easiest to take away when we explain too much, too soon.

Not the meaning.

The possibility of discovering it.

When Does Explaining Art Stop Helping? was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.