The discerning reader knows, and has known since those distant Babylonian times when the Etemenanki (the Tower of Babel) was built, that human ambition to erect a towering building was destined to fail, and that the punishment for this ambition is the confusion of our languages. But photographer Pablo Ortiz Monasterio does not aim to speak Mao's language or educate us in Cyrillic; rather, he seeks to recognize a kind of plasticity—the calligraphy of life itself, so to speak—in which men and women are also a form of writing in themselves, they are yet another series of lines across the canvas of the worlds.