The most difficult (and maybe therefore the most satisfying) photographic problems are to do with picturing the relationships between people, how we see each other and how those dynamics might work in visual terms, translating the complex subjectivities of that exchange into a kind of narrative. But just the apparently simple act of making a portrait exists in a space that is culturally charged, and often explicitly gendered. A real willingness to address those power relationships is what underpins the project Women Studies by Paolo Morales. It is a conscientious deconstruction of how we actually look at each other, the “gaze” as performative act, further elaborated into a set of questions about photography itself, a confluence of desire and attainment rooted in the particular encounter he has with each of these women, both as a photographer and as a man. At stake too is the psychological distance that we so often expect the medium to cover – and a myriad of ways in which it subverts those same expectations, leaving only the trace of an unrealised presence.
See the rest of this series on his website here. Be sure to have a look at his other portraiture too.
