Carousel: An Essay on Seeing

From an award-winning writer, a personal and critical reflection on the human desire to see and be seen

Carousel opens as a professor begins delivering a slide lecture in a darkened room. Her students are visible on Zoom, internet in their pockets, screens on their wrists, seeing more than students ever could before. But what, in fact, do they see?

In the spirit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Sarah Minor’s Carousel considers how the pursuit of panoramic vision frames power, distorts reality, and implicates both viewer and subject. Across short, immersive sections blending history and memoir, close looking and confession, educator and writer Minor masterfully fuses the slide carousel with the lyric essay. As professor-narrator she invites us to see across time, guiding us from the Bayeux Tapestry to surrealist paintings and Instagram reels, from hot-air balloons to drone warfare and the surveillance state. In language that captures the disorientation of that other carousel, the whirling carnival ride, Minor shows how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves.