One of the power of photography is the combination of the relative technical simplicity of its practice with the power of the photographer’s gaze. The camera is ultimately little or nothing; the gaze is almost everything. It so happens that, unlike other techniques that are more complex in realization (including film), photography allows us to discover new ways of seeing the world and those who inhabit it.

One example is the gaze of Judith Joy Ross. Sometimes, all it takes is two photos to discover a new worldview meeting a photographer. Two photos like these:

This photo alone might go unnoticed in the billions of shots appearing around us. It looks like a typical portrait, frontal half-bust, figure in focus, background out of focus, as in the recipe for cell phone portraits. Then I look at the gaze of Michelle Fraser, photographed by Judith Joy Ross at a protest demonstration against the war in Iraq, and I perceive something quite mysterious, intriguing, unusual in this gaze. I would not know how to translate this difference except by noting that usually the character in a portrait offers herself, lends herself, to the voyeuristic gaze of the photographer (and of our gaze looking at the photograph). Here, on the other hand, the portrait, (this one like others, often of women), instead of allowing itself to be looked at, looks at the photographer and looks at us. Instead of being the object, these images are the active subject of the photograph. There is no passivity in that faces but an active, challenging force. You only have to look at another portrait of Judith Joy Ross, taken 20 years earlier, also in Pennsylvania, and you immediately see that there is a connection. What links these images for me is the portrait of gazes looking back at the camera, at the photographer and, at the moment we watch these images, at us.

 

 

Judith Joy Ross – Photographies 1978-2015