Photography : GAZE

It was October 31, 2014–My roommate and I were working hard on our school assignments when we saw a group of construction workers in the hotel across the street. As our window faced directly to their window, they seemed eager to wave "Hello" to us, to which we gladly reciprocated. What happened next was a chain of downward events; the construction workers (clearly not focused on their job) began writing a phone number down on a large piece of cardboard and held it up against the window. The phone number obviously belonging to one of the many 40-something-year-old men, they began mouthing the number at us. Feeling extremely violated in our own home, my roommate and I began snapping photos of them using our phones and cameras as a way of returning the voyeuristic feeling. Unfortunately, this only provoked one of them because he began stripping by the window, gaze fixated onto us, like one of those prostitutes in the Red Light District. 

This event not only bugged me constantly for months afterwards (believe it or not, these things happen more often than not, entering into the privacy of our own apartment), but it also inspired me to create a photographic series out of it in March 2015. Neither my roommate nor I knew exactly what this man was thinking of when he was taking his clothes off, or what exact emotion drove him to do what he did. It wasn't exactly the taking off the clothes that bothered me, it was more the fact that he did it staring right at us. We didn't exactly know what he was thinking, so why were we so creeped out about his fixated gaze? Was it his age, his gender, his build, his ethnicity? Through this series, I wanted to ask myself, and throw the question out there, "What affects the message behind the gaze?".

Each participant was asked to portray a particular type of 'smile', picked randomly out of a hat by the participant. I simply captured their portrayal, and displayed the images for the audience to read and guess what kind of 'smile' they felt the participant was portraying. What is affecting your reading of the gaze?

Give it a guess.