Dorian Tocker's 'The Cut Is Starting to Scab' Documents Everyday Decay

Dorian Tocker, a Brooklyn-born filmmaker and photographer based in Los Angeles, explores the unnoticed cracks of daily life in his photographic project 'The Cut Is Starting to Scab.' Trained at the American Film Institute, Tocker has shown work on the Criterion Channel, MTV, at SXSW, on Booooooom, and at Art Basel Miami Beach in a presentation by Playboy. The series captures domestic spaces and objects marked by slow, almost imperceptible wear—walls, objects, rooms where time leaves minimal but constant traces. Human attempts to restore order, like straightening an object or cleaning a surface, become part of the crack rather than a remedy. The title refers to a wound that has not fully healed, only begun to scab—a visible, fragile process. The project is part of a larger body of work on rupture and impermanence, shaped by a childhood loss that Tocker openly acknowledges but never explicitly depicts. No bodies or events appear; only the surfaces of things, observed with patience. Tocker does not photograph loss itself but what remains around it after time has begun its imperfect mending.