Morgan Levy, Thirty-nine Moved by Hand
Description
Brooklyn-based photographer Morgan Levy was profiled in V&A Magazine (Issue 68, Winter 2025) in conversation with Aimée Dawson, as part of Finding Peace, showcasing recipients of the Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography. Levy had witnessed an apprenticeship training exercise several times, in which women and non-binary people were required to move a full load of breeze blocks from one pallet to another. She chose not to photograph the real trainees, which she felt would be invasive, and instead restaged the scene as a reenactment, consciously avoiding the documentary gaze.
In Thirty-nine Moved by Hand, she shows the aftermath of the task. A woman lies across the stacked bricks, her body spent from the work. She clasps the hand of a co-worker, a small act of solidarity. Seen from above, her figure looks sculptural against the geometry of the blocks. The image holds both strength and vulnerability, the physical weight of labour and the tenderness of human connection.
Reflection
I was drawn to this work because it uses reenactment. In my own project Phantom Mirror, I use AI to create scenes that could never have been captured at the time. For me this comes from being a participant rather than an observer. When I am with my family dealing with dementia my role is care and presence. Picking up a camera is not possible.
AI allows me to return to those moments not as a record but as reenactment. It gives me a way to work with experiences afterwards, and sometimes to shift perspective. Many of my images try to see through Lolly’s eyes, not from outside but from within her disorientation, to imagine how she might be feeling.
In Thirty-nine Moved by Hand, the futility of the task is clear. The woman has moved the bricks from one pallet to another, yet the logic of the exercise suggests they could easily be moved back again. It is repetitive labour with no endpoint, an image of endurance rather than achievement, much like caring for someone with dementia.
Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), retells the Greek story of Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, only for it to roll back down each time. For Camus, importance lies not in completion but in endurance.
“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
This cycle of futility and persistence also runs through feminist critiques of labour. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex (1949), wrote:
“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
De Beauvoir pointed to a civilian crisis where women’s endurance was confined to the domestic sphere. Thirty-nine Moved by Hand builds on this legacy. By showing a woman collapsed after the repetitive task of moving bricks, it connects the unseen cycles of housework with the physical strain of labour outside the home. Both show how women’s work is often measured in repetition and endurance rather than recognition.
This also connects to my own experience. In Phantom Mirror I created works such as Joy of Sisyphus and Scythian Joy, where repetition became a metaphor for dementia and care. My father, caring for my stepmother, repeats the same reassurance every fifteen minutes. His survival lies not in solving anything but in meeting each cycle with patience. Looking at Levy’s Thirty-nine Moved by Hand, I realised I could also see myself not as the exhausted figure but as the co-worker, the hand offered to steady and support.
Both Levy’s practice and mine use reenactment to step beyond the documentary gaze. The uncanny quality of the staged or AI-generated image allows truths to surface that lie beyond direct representation. This is also where the work connects to Alien Familiar Art, where images feel both real and unreal, familiar yet estranged.
Curatorial Context
Seen today, Levy’s photograph belongs to a wider return in art to themes of labour, care, and endurance. It speaks to post-pandemic burnout, undervalued work, and the precarious future shaped by AI. The feminist dimension is central. Thirty-nine Moved by Hand shows empowerment: women and non-binary people taking on roles of physical endurance. But it is also critique. In a world of crisis and economic instability, and with jobs increasingly displaced by AI, women are being pushed into undervalued or physically demanding labour. Levy’s image reflects both strength and the cost of endurance under pressure.
The work can also be read through the lens of performance art, where endurance, repetition, and vulnerability have long been explored. From Marina Abramović to Tehching Hsieh, artists have used the body to test limits and turn exhaustion into meaning. Levy’s reenactment extends this lineage into photography, creating an image that is both sculptural and human, monumental and intimate.
References
Morgan Levy, Thirty-nine Moved by Hand, in Aimée Dawson, Finding Peace, V&A Magazine, Issue 68, Winter 2025.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942.