Trust. It’s a daily requirement. We trust our milk won’t be contaminated, that our cereal will just contain cereal, that the mailman will actually deliver our checks, that the person we opt to confide in over lunch won’t laugh, that our advisers have our best interests at heart. We know the laws that require milk to be pasteurized, and our food to be inspected for and created in safety, it’s our trust in people that bears particular fascination for me. Laws, although useful for setting up social contracts, cannot dictate things as minute as trust in an individual. Yet everywhere a human turns in the web of human activities, he touches upon solicitations to trust – trust is everywhere. So why do we do it, and how do we do it? How do we decide who we will trust? This project will explore these questions of forming and reforming trust, of deciding to trust, of what happens when that trust is broken, and of trusting again.
The initial phase of this project will be research into trust and trust formation, looking into how and why we form trust, what we do when trust is broken, and then circling back to how and why we form trust after we know it can be impermanent, and can hurt. Accompanying this essay will be a photography exhibit detailing a personal journey through trust, utilizing black and white photography, several models, and a grey sweater once owned by my ex-husband.