Portrait Journal.
Portraiture interests me because a face can't lie all the way through. It can try—and sometimes it pulls it off for a while—but at some point something cracks, and what surfaces is what's really there.
That's what I've been after since I started making photographs. Not the flattering moment. The other one.
The face as territory
I'm drawn to portraiture as a form of identification. The other person's face as a mirror: the chance to recognize yourself in someone you don't know, or to recognize in a stranger something you'd rather wasn't there.
Diane Arbus looked at the people society preferred to ignore, and she did it head-on, with no safety distance. She never turned anyone into a case or a curiosity: she looked at them as equals, and that produced portraits you couldn't stay outside of. They pulled you in.
Richard Avedon reached the same place by another road: he stripped away the set, stripped away the context, left the person alone against the white background. Nothing to hold on to. That formal nakedness is merciless, and also the most honest I've found. A set always offers a way out, something to divert your eyes to. Avedon took it away. What was left was the face. Only that.
The limits of the real
There's something that connects Avedon to Arbus, and that Witkin takes even further: the conviction that the camera can push toward where a conversation wouldn't reach. Joel-Peter Witkin works with veils, with masks, with bodies that question what we consider photographable. His photographs aren't comfortable. What interests me about him isn't provocation as an end in itself: it's the willingness not to turn the camera away when something disturbing shows up.
That idea—that an image can hold things naturalism doesn't know how to contain—is what led me to photomontage. It interests me as a tool for taking the everyday—a face, a gesture, something completely ordinary—and shifting it toward the edge of reality. There's a territory right there, between what you recognize and what you can no longer catalog, that strikes me as the most honest place to work. Some of these pieces have glazes, projected light, elements that don't belong to the naturalism of the straight shot. It's the language that feels most my own.
The gray and the square
Within that territory, black-and-white and the square aren't aesthetic decisions among others (though they're that too, of course). Color adds noise: there's skin tone, there's clothing, there's atmosphere, and the face has to compete with all of it. In gray, the emergency exit disappears. And the square levels things out: a rectangular frame comes with built-in hierarchy, what's at the top weighs more, the edges invite you to escape. The square has no axis privileges. The weight falls in the center.
The portraits in this section are some of the ones I've made over the years. I have many more unpublished, from earlier, from periods that belong to other moments. I'm sharing these not because they're the best, but because in each one, when I look at it now, I remember why I took that shot. The cameras changed—from the analog gear of the early 2000s to the Hasselblads of recent years—but what I was after in each face didn't.
There are 80. Black-and-white, square format, between 2002 and 2022.
What's worth knowing.
If you've made it this far and you're wondering what this is—what these portraits are, why black-and-white and square, whether you can buy them—these are the questions I get asked most.