Drawing from a rich collection at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, former Curatorial Assistant, Karsten Lund, crafts a dynamic exhibit featuring photographical portraits from the 1940s to 2006. According to Lund, Witness, explores the role of the photographer in perceiving people “unconventionally.” In displaying a wide-range of photographical styles—from Walker Evans’ subway vignettes, to Alfredo Jaar’s large-scale installation—the selection investigates the interactions between object and perspective. The exhibit’s temporal and stylistic diversity offers a historically recurring and significant question: how does a photograph reveal the relationship between subject and “witness.” Through comparing the work of Walker Evans and Thomas Ruff, I propose that the photographer’s perspective is fundamental to the photograph’s—and thus the human subject’s—representation of reality.

Walker Evans’ eight gelatin prints from the 1940s depict various strangers riding the subway in New York. Using a hidden camera, Evans glimpses subjects in moments of transition—lost in thought, waiting, observing others, all while he intently does the same. Placed in a technologically distant era from now, routine, intermediary phases offered a static stretch of time for passengers to either exist within one’s thoughts, or in the observation of one’s physical surroundings. With no pocket-sized window to the virtual and digital, people’s expressions during temporal in-betweens were much more diverse than today’s wash of screen staring.  In discussing his untitled series, Evans writes, “The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than when in lone bedrooms (where there are mirrors). People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.” Through catching the “naked repose,” Evans’ photographs propose momentary viewings into complex lives. In 1988, German artist, Thomas Ruff, created a series of large-scale, chromogenic portraits. Unlike Evans’ small, unobtrusive windows, Ruff’s work is bold and domineering. The displayed portrait, Portrait (C. Kewer), is crafted to be as systematic and neutral as possible. It stands against the romantic and conventional trope that fine photography exposes a subject’s psychology, and instead presents a passport-like, standardized formula. In viewing the subject through enlarged, hyper-realistic definition, Ruff augments the faces’ porous details to a most grotesque level, exploring how photography can expose the underlying sameness of all human subjects.

The contextual vision of time is critical to the two projects’ conflicting approaches. Evans’ prints feature people static in motion. Though they are stuck still, both in the photograph and train, their environment is moving, bended to the speed of the subway’s transition. Therefore, the photographs investigate a seemingly paradoxical relationship between the stagnancy of photography and waiting, and the motion of history and transition. Motion, a product of time, glues the subjects to the ephemeral, to the mortal. With an inherent beginning, middle and end, motion implies context, narrative. Through freezing stolen moments of transition, Evans’ photographs represent subjects through the experiential. Though I do not know the subjects, nor the intricacies of their lives, I can relate to their contextualized experiences, their hidden, yet foundational narratives. The photographs strike me as deeply empathetic. The subtleties of my own experiences fill the misty gaps, while simultaneously probing the wonder of narratives not my own. Ruff’s portrait, on the other hand, is completely devoid of motion, and therefore, time. Like pressing my eyes up to a brick wall, the portrait is lifeless in its divorce from implied narrative. Its static, blunt presence offers a dull and simple view into a human’s existence. In it’s large-scale, hyper-realism, the undercurrents of a subject’s psychology are washed into a non-expression of neutral flesh. 

Stepping outside the frame, Evans and Ruff paradoxically address their roles as “the witness.” While Evans approaches his series through spontaneously stylized snapshots, Ruff carefully positions his camera to veil the photographer’s integral and interjected perspective. Evans plays with moving shadows and ranging angles, defining his perspective as a fellow stranger from across the aisle. For example, his photograph of an elderly women (bottom row, far left) angles slightly up, emphasizing the hidden view from his camera. Thus, the angle portrays not only the photographer’s presence, but his method of secret snapping. Next, the elderly woman’s hands, and a man in the background are slightly blurred. Using a range of definition between the blurry forms and the precision of the woman’s face, Evans softens and veils the subject and environment’s ordinary realism. In black and white, Evans photographs represent a gesture of reality observed through a narratively-driven, cloaked lens. Ruff’s photographical perspective is based in the illusion of transparency. The camera faces its subject, perfectly still and perfectly straight—the effect: neutrality. The photographer’s looming gaze seems to be inexistent; the perspective, therefore, lies in that of an unfeeling, objective machine. In stealthily removing the giveaways of his artistic tinkering, the veil between the subject and viewer is seemingly eradicated. Because the photographer seems to be inexistent, the viewer gazes upon the subject not through the perspective of another feeling human being, but through a total objectivity.   

Peering into Walker Evans’ series, I see glancing vignettes of real lives I feel I can relate to, but do not know. And shrinking under Ruff’s engrossing portrait, I see a face, composed of flesh and hair and nothing more. With two conflicting, artistic statements, I see room for synthesis. Perhaps humans are both. Perhaps we are a dynamic collection of thoughts and experiences, with a unifying base of flesh and existence. As I sit on the bus home, I witness the faces around me, and simply do not know.