THE ROLLING EXHIBITION: Legless Skateboarder Stares Back

Sample image from Kevin Connolly's
online photo gallery, The Rolling
Exhibition.

We all know this look.

I'm not just talking about the disabled community, either. At some point or other, we've all been stared at. Curiosity is fundamental to the human experience, and everyone—wherever they fall along the spectrum of ability—has inevitably been on both sides of it. We engage with the new, the unfamiliar, and the foreign by devoting to it the sense we rely on most: sight. Whether you're introducing yourself to a class, stumbling on a stairwell, or even catching someone's eye at a bar, you hold an audience captive in the brief moment that you're centered directly in someone's vision.

Of course, anyone with a visible disability will be more familiar with this particular look than others. We receive a distinctive brand of stare. There's pure curiosity, sure, but there's also the furrowed brows of confusion or contemplation—what's wrong with her? why does he walk, speak, or look that way?—or the pinched expressions of pity. All stares end abruptly when the starer's social awareness, conditioned not to call such blatant attention to the anomalous, kicks in. Their gazes jerk in a different direction. Physical differences are swept aside. Social proceedings continue as usual.

But for that brief moment, their stares reveal what their averted glances later hide: that universal human curiosity. An inherent interest in what one perceives to be different or strange; a desire to investigate what one has never before encountered. All of this in the raw, unmediated by social conditioning, with the shock of the new, the unfamiliar, and the foreign cleaving momentarily through all considerations of what's "proper" and "appropriate."

In some ways, the starer becomes just as vulnerable in the act of staring—just as exposed—as the actual subject of the stare.

"For the same reason we want to know how a magic trick works, or how mystery novel ends, we want to know how someone different, strange, or disfigured came to be as they are," photographer Kevin Connolly writes in The Rolling Exhibition's artist statement.

Everyone does it. It's natural... But before any of us can ponder or speculate—we react. We stare. Whether it is a glance or a neck twisting ogle, we look at that which does not seem to fit in our day to day lives. It is that one instant of unabashed curiosity—more reflex than conscious action—that makes us who we are and has been one of my goals to capture over the past year.

Connolly is more familiar than most with this kind of stare. The picture below should explain why.

Connolly was born with bilateral amelia, a medical term indicating that his legs just never developed. As a result, he's spent much of his life on his knuckles. Wheelchairs and prostheses were offered as means of more efficient movement, but like a typical college student, Connolly eventually settled on the skateboard as his main mode of transportation. "I could replace the parts and use it a lot cheaper than a wheelchair," he said. "I was in college, on a skateboard, trying to go out on this MacGyvered path my family had started for me"—a path that included pulleys, torso-fitted "butt boots," and very few limitations that couldn't be overcome using one of his father's homemade contraptions.

This understandably drew some attention when he began traveling in his early twenties.

In every country he visited, the self-described "legless skateboarder" confronted a new crop of starers, each with their own culture-bred notions of how best to interact with someone like Connolly. In the Ukraine, one man hoisted up Connolly from behind as he boarded a train. "His eyes just read of pure fear," Connolly says in an interview:

...and he's speaking rapidly in Russian to me, but I don’t speak Russian! My best guess, though, is that he was just like, "Oh my God, this guy needs help. I should pick him up," without thinking of the second half of that, which was, "Where do I put him?"

Others assumed he was a beggar and slipped money into his backpack. Some tried to bless him. One woman approached him and asked, simply, "Thalidomide?"

"I was just kind of sick of being stared at," Connolly says, referring to a moment in his travels where he felt particularly isolated from friends and family, more of a curio than a human being.

And so, in that moment, he decided to stare back.

While cruising down a sidewalk in Vienna, Connolly—holding the camera at his waist so that it wouldn't draw any attention, and facing its lens backward—snapped a photo of a man ogling him from behind. For the first time, he'd captured the distinctive look that has been following him since birth, familiar only to those with visible physical differences. This single photo evolved into a collection of over thirty-two thousand others taken across fifteen countries, each documenting the same universal expression: the stare.

"You're capturing this moment when they're trying to formulate a story," he says. "Was it disease? Was it a birth defect? Was it a landmine?" According to Connolly, though these stories bear little resemblance to reality, they reflect more on their creators than they do on him, their subject: "These narratives all come from the context in which we live our lives. Illness, drugs, calamity, war—all of these might become potential stories depending upon what we are exposed to in connection with disability." Indeed, though the expression on each face is the same, the thoughts and assumptions underlying them—as shown through Connelly's interactions with strangers while traveling—vary as dramatically as the regions he visits.

"Looking at each face, I saw humanity," he says, concluding his artist's statement. "Rolling through their streets, I found the unique cultures and customs that created an individual."

Connelly's online gallery, The Rolling Exhibition, can be accessed here.

Now, as a television host, Connolly invites staring. Earlier this year, the Travel Channel launched his new series, Armed & Ready, where he tackles high-impact sports and thrill-seeking activities such as luging, jousting, and cliff diving. Its trailer begins with this command to the viewer: "Go ahead. Do a double-take."

Trailer for Connolly's TV series, Armed & Ready.

I'm worried that Connolly might be straying into "supercrip" territory here, but that may not be such a bad thing in his case. "Supercrips," after all, have the benefit of visibility. By spotlighting their capacity to "overcome" a disability and therefore live ordinary—and in Connolly's case, extraordinary—lives, they spotlight the topic of disability as well. Certainly, the show's appeal targets Connolly's disability as much as (and maybe more than) what the trailer calls his "extreme adventures." This doesn't disturb Connolly in the least. In fact, he asserts that his disability is what makes the show compelling and memorable. In an interview, he says:

One of the things that I've found is an implicit advantage of not having legs—especially with regards to having a travel show—is that not only do I have a unique point of view, but [also] a set of really unique challenges that, often times, haven't been discovered or overcome before.

Unlike many within the disabled community, Connolly does define himself by his disability. (Literally: his bio on Twitter reads, "Legless skateboarder author-guy who is not the ginger from Entourage.") And he's okay with that. He is not reduced or limited by this self-definition. In fact, it amplifies him in some way, advertises the unique realm of his physical experience while inviting others to stare and explore it themselves. He is one face of disability pride—distinct from disability awareness, distinct from disability rights. In his creative work, he celebrates both the starer and the stared-at, as well as the innate curiosity that unites them both.

Go ahead, he offers. Do a double-take.

Meg