A Series of Photographs Loosely Based on Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange

I wanted to photograph what coercion looks like at its most basic: something soft and alive meeting something that exists only to reshape it. Inspired by Anthony Burgess's metaphor of a "clockwork orange", an organism stripped of choice by external force, this series pairs oranges with the hand tools that cut, clamp, drill, and pry them apart. The tools don't act with malice; they simply do what they were made to do, which is precisely the point. As the tools take hold, color bleeds from the surroundings the way the world narrows and dulls when you're the one being worked on. Each image moves the orange further from what it was, until the juice and sweetness are gone and only the work remains.