This photograph by Chris Levine, Lightness of Being, is extraordinary for a variety of reasons, the most important one possibly being that it utterly confounds our expectations¹. We live in a day and age where usually the opposite is true: Photographs of public figures are made to show us what we expect, ideally in the most glorious form. We could call this our cultural sublime: Getting awed in exactly the way we expect to get awed. In the strictest sense, this type of sublime is at least 50% fake, because what we’re ultimately really in awe of is our own (imagined) sense of good taste. Find the full piece here.