By Meredith D. Breech, November 10, 2025
In the back of the Leica store in the Meatpacking District is a small one-room gallery. On view through November 2nd was a new series by Bruce Gilden which captures citizens of Naples in his signature black and white style, along with his large-scale face portraits. There isn’t much text on the walls of the exhibition—just a quote that describes the work as “revelatory” and says the artist records the “whole truth of his subject in powerful, provocative, and indelibly authentic images.” There’s no doubt that Gilden’s photographic style is authentic, but the viewer will be hard-pressed to find the “whole truth” of any of his subjects within these compositions.
Gilden’s photos often seem to catch their subjects unawares, with a compositional sameness that is at once recognizable as his: the camera is slanted, the subject is scorched by bright flash, the background recedes. Expressions are slack, guarded, weary, or else are frozen by his shutter seemingly right as they open their mouth to speak. The closely cropped photographs of his subjects’ faces are printed at the largest scale, with a clarity that highlights every pore and hair. The repetition of these front-facing, cropped photos evoke the functional photographs collected by the state, such as a DMV photo or a mugshot. They seem more suited not to reveal something about their subjects, but rather to make a clear visual record.
The artist suggests what kind of visual record he’s building with this portraiture in the exhibition’s accompanying book: “The ‘face project’, started with people who I thought were left behind… they’re invisible to other people. So I wanted to show that there are people like this, you know, don't turn your back on them.” Gilden claims to want to make his subjects visible, but he does so with a grim sort of uniformity. Any information they may organically convey to the world through their clothes, body language, or environment is largely cropped out or indiscernable. So what about them is he making more visible, with just a neutral expression, and every dark spot, scratch, and wrinkle over-emphasized in high definition? He photographs the aesthetics of what he describes as a discarded person and stops just there. The effect is dehumanizing.
Gilden has directly answered claims that his work is degrading to his subjects. In an interview, he said, “Just because you're close up, that doesn't mean that you’re dehumanizing. I mean, I'm not changing anything. That's how the people look… Just because this person has a physical defect, whether it's by birth or accident, why does that mean I shouldn’t take his photo? He was comfortable with it.” What is not understood is that his photographs have meaning outside of his experience of taking them. Photography has a long history of demeaning subjects with and without the initial consent of the person being imaged. Photographers have a choice to consider how their photographs exist within the broader visual culture and to develop a practice that does not exploit others for their own financial or artistic gain, especially those who have less visibility. On the table in the center of the viewing room was a price sheet for the works on view, with a stack of his books for sale.
Gilden often returns to the subject of his critics: “My critics I think would be happy if I just gave up and got old and died, but I’m not doing that…” Critics review art, particularly photography, because they know its importance. It shapes the understanding of our shared humanity and can either complicate or flatten our ideas of a historical moment or group of people. But with Gilden, the photographs he takes aren’t really about his subjects—who they are, their individual experiences, their layered humanity. In his own words: “The photos are not necessarily about Naples. Ultimately, the pictures are about me.” If the photographer were to listen to his critics more closely, he would understand that many of them want to see complexity and nuance underneath that confrontational style, something that communicates more of his subjects than just their flawed physicality. But I guess that’s the hang-up—to be able to show us the whole truth of his subjects, he would have to see it.
Meredith D. Breech is an independent curator who was previously Associate Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska New York. She was part of the inaugural cohort of the Studio Museum's Arts Leadership Praxis in 2024.
BRUCE GILDEN "Untitled" 2024.
BRUCE GILDEN "Untitled" 2024.
BRUCE GILDEN "Untitled" 2024.
BRUCE GILDEN "Untitled" 2024.
BRUCE GILDEN "Untitled" 2024.