During my artist residency in Rome in 1999, I repeatedly visited the Bocca della Verità. Interested in the endurance of a ritual whose origins lie in antiquity, I photographed tourists as they enacted and staged themselves before the stone mask. 

Read from a temporal distance of twenty-five years, the images function as documents of a fleeting social choreography. The individuals portrayed have aged; some may no longer be alive. The photographs address questions of belief, performance, and the implicit promise of truth embedded in the ritual. In certain faces, a moment of hesitation becomes visible — a point at which superstition, spectacle, and doubt converge.