The Occasional Odd Thought

Borrego Springs; January 2016

We went to the desert so my wife could shoot some time lapse footage through the night. Happily, I had my tripod with me too.

Photograph by Nur Nielfa

nurnielfa.tumblr.com

From The Inner Circle of Europe

It’s hard to grasp how the press materials for Bruce Gilden’s new book Face can blithely describe the work as consisting of “collaborative” portraits when the pictures resemble nothing so much as frontal assaults. It’s doubtful that anyone would willingly ‘collaborate’ on the effort to produce images that are so deeply unflattering. Gilden prides himself on his honesty, which is opposed in this case to the artificiality of social media portraits and the ubiquitous selfie (if we are to believe the accompanying essay). But here he has strayed so far into cruel grotesquerie that the results have, ironically, an acute falseness to them, far more so than the deliberate choice of a flattering profile picture on Facebook, for example. These are not real, living people at all, at last not in the way they’re seen here. They’re just a chance to stare in a way that would not be otherwise permissible - and that actually isn’t. It might well be a novel idea for Gilden, but ‘collaboration’ involves a great deal more than just asking someone can you take their picture before blasting away.

Making a photographic portrait almost always involves an unequal power relation; the photographer holds all of the cards. They control the framing, the background, the moment in which the picture is made, the final selection of an image to be printed or published, to a certain extent they also control the pose of their subject, who admittedly might have agreed to be photographed, but doesn’t always grasp exactly what they’re giving up in doing so. For a portrait to be ‘collaborative’ even in the general sense there has to also be a relinquishing of control on the part of the photographer rather than just the subject. It involves a willingness to include the subject’s own view of themselves and allowing that view to determine what the finished picture will be. Just asking someone if you can photograph them might not be Gilden’s usual method, but it falls far sort of collaboration as such. Similarly, asserting that the subjects “engage directly with the camera” doesn’t mean that they have any meaningful role in what the picture will actually look like or in how they are portrayed. In this case it just implies they’re looking at the camera and that in itself is still a fairly long way from engagement.

Isn’t class the real issue with this work? I would argue that it is, given that the pictures are made to be viewed - possibly owned - by people of means and they feature exclusively people whose relative lack of means is written all over their faces. So, whatever Gilden’s actual intentions might have been, the impression the work creates is of it being a freak-show, a sort of pictorial slum tour, amusing and enlightening the well-to-do. In the context of economic thinking that suggests poverty isn’t the result of gross systemic inequality, but of people just not trying hard enough, the message of these pictures is particularly egregious, perhaps doubly so since Gilden’s work on the issue of sub-prime mortgages and home foreclosures displayed an unexpected sensitivity on this issue. But Face lacks even the visual interest that enlivened his earlier work, such as the pictures he made in his native New York, arguably his best. But here the repetitive format of full face close-up offers no variation and his use of flash rather brutally exaggerates the features of people chosen for their supposed authenticity, but who actually seem to have been selected by Gilden because they look weird - there’s no more depth here than that.

water XX, 2015

untitled