The Faces of North+Charles: The Politics of the Gaze

The Faces of North+Charles: The Politics of the Gaze began as a formal problem – how to incorporate the urban landscape into improvisational portraits – and evolved into an examination of the politics of the gaze, an investigation of the dynamic relationship among three subjects: the sitter, the photographer, and the viewer of the image. This interactive exchange is unstable and shifting. Each gazes upon the other, in what might be considered acts of performance, adopting different social behaviors, ethical postures, and moral attitudes. Whether any one position is correct or preferable is beside the point; the fact is many are at our disposal, ready for our choosing. In choosing, we become complicit in creating the work of art.

It is undoubtedly true that  portraiture has become a treacherous terrain in which to work. After Arbus, Mapplethorpe, Sturges, Nixon, and Mann, making in situ portraits in a troubled Baltimore neighborhood such as the North+Charles corridor, with its mélange of homeless people and poets, drug addicts and dealers, retired school teachers and students, artists and musicians, psychologists and publicists, musicians and ex-GIs, benefactors and folks on Social Security, working men and women, is courting disaster. Are these pictures empathetic or exploitative? True or false? Honest or fraudulent? What defines identity – gender, race, and class? – or are people free to make their own choices? You decide.