The Bully Pulpit

The Bully Pulpit utilises self-portrait photography to explore non-textual responses to cyberbullying occurring on social media platforms and other websites. Working with constructed photographic methods, Morris-Cafiero costumed herself to look like 25 of her cyberbullies and inserted their bullying comment in the image. Due to the content delivery network, a system of computers that connects users to current and historical internet content, images exist on the internet indefinitely. By exploring a non-textual response to bullies, this act of anti-bullying cannot be removed or edited by the bully.

The research began in 2013 with the collection of bullying comments on mainstream and social media posts, emails and blogs. From 2013 to 2016, over 4,300 messages were collected from a variety of sources. In 2018, a pool of 60 bullies were identified for further investigation. The final group of 25 bullies were chosen to create a pool that represents bullies from a wide range of locations, age (13-70), perspective of bullying comment and visual data available on their social media profiles.

This research contributes new knowledge to photographic practices that use social media as a tool for production and cyberbullying in relation to body politics and feminist discourses of female beauty standards.