Face

‘Here are Bruce Gilden’s people, his family. He shares their teeth, their stubble, their scrapes and blemishes, their fear of death. In the women’s scowls, in their sternly ambiguous glances, he sees his own mother’s face, before she killed herself.nnWe live in a world whose visual lingua franca has rapidly become the decontextualized, always posed, mechanically lit idiom of social media, of Instagram and, yes, Facebook (and whatever their successors might be). Far from rejecting this environment, Bruce’s portraits embrace it and grapple with it. They say to the viewer: So, you’ve constructed your ‘social network’ out of aspirational pictures, of yourself and of your ‘friends’, but what space does that leave for these people? They are my ‘face book’ friends. You need to look at them – at us – too. You can’t make us disappear with digital photo filters and social media platforms that act as a real world filter, sifting from your ‘community’ all that is discomfiting. We are here, closer than you might remember.‘