A crack in the wall, an object put back in its place for the umpteenth time, a strand of hair curling, these are all details we usually don’t look at, because our eye is trained to skip over them, to look for the exceptional rather than the everyday. It’s exactly on this, on what we no longer look at, that Dorian Tocker focuses in his photographic project The cut is starting to scab.

Born in Brooklyn and now based in Los Angeles, Tocker moves between film and photography with the same sensibility, that of someone looking, as he himself puts it, for the quiet ruptures where the ordinary meets the metaphysical. A director trained at the American Film Institute, he has brought his work to the Criterion Channel, MTV, SXSW, Booooooom and Art Basel Miami Beach in a presentation by Playboy, a path that holds together narrative language and photographic eye without either one taking over.

The cut is starting to scab gathers images of everyday environments caught in their slow, almost imperceptible wear. Walls, objects, domestic spaces where time leaves minimal but constant marks, and where small human attempts at order, a straightened object, a wiped-down surface, become part of the crack themselves, not a remedy to it. Hence the title of the project: the cut hasn’t fully healed, it’s only just starting to scab, a halfway process, visible, still fragile.

The project is part of a broader body of work Dorian Tocker has been developing over time, one dedicated to rupture and impermanence, shaped by the long reverberations of a childhood loss. It’s a biographical detail the artist states openly, but one that in the images never translates into explicit narrative, staying in the background instead, like an emotional tone that colors every shot without ever naming itself. There are no bodies on stage, no event to reconstruct, there’s only the surface of things, observed with a patience that resembles that of someone returning again and again to the same place, looking for something they already know they won’t find.

It’s in this distance, between what the image shows and what it alludes to without saying, that The cut is starting to scab finds its strength. Tocker doesn’t photograph loss, he photographs what remains around it once time has already begun its work of imperfect mending, that kind of domestic order we keep imposing on things even when we know it won’t really fix anything.