Press Release: Fielding, Look at me
Sight is central to the medium of photography. But what happens when the subjects of photographic portraits cannot look back at the photographer or even see their own image? An in-depth pictorial study of blind school children in Mexico, Look at me draws attention to (and distinctions between) the activity of sight and the consciousness of form.
Combining elements of his earlier, acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding dwells closely on these children’s features and gestures, exploring the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior, innocence and knowing, beauty and grotesque. Fielding’s work achieves what only great art, and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. Look at me contains more than sixty arresting images from which we often want to look away, but into which we are nevertheless drawn by their deep humanity and palpable tenderness. This is a monograph of uncommon significance by an important American photographer.
Read the press release.