Photographer Sees America, No Filter

It’s a road in the Southwest, and the photograph’s exposure emphasizes the blasting sun and shadows it makes. The weathered face of the subject, the cast of his eyes, makes him seem as though he has a thousand stories, and maybe he’ll tell us one. But, the photographer reveals, he never did.

“At the height of the summer of 2020, we landed in Gallup, NM empty streets. An eerie desert silence mixed with the constant whistle and screeching metal on metal wheels and track of the never-ending present locomotive,” the photographer writes. ​“Here I encountered these two Native American gentlemen. We never spoke a word.”

Gallup, New Mexico is just one of a deluge of deeply affecting and human images in ​“America Unfiltered,” running now at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art at 51 Trumbull St. through Aug. 4.

The project begins from a disarmingly simple place. ​“At the height of the pandemic, two immigrant filmmakers — one from Panama, the other from Russia — journeyed across the United States uncovering an unfiltered, unflinching portrait of America. What if we could better relate to one another and heal our nation’s divides by seeing that we share so much beneath the surface? What if we found the courage to ask questions and just listen, overpowering our natural instinct to react?” an accompanying statement reads.

“Seeking to build empathy amidst a fractured country and uncertain future, ​‘America Unfiltered’ sets out on a cross country journey to photograph people and record their stories about what it means to live in America today. Arising from a series of raw and emotional encounters touching on topics from politics and race to love and immigration, the film and accompanying photography exhibition present an unvarnished vision of our shared humanity and engender hope for our country’s next chapter.”

From that clear, straightforward idea comes a flood of moving details. Horacio Marquinez’s lens crosses divides of race, class, gender, geography, and culture. His eye for, and ability to bring out, the emotion in his subjects is humbling. Just as important for the exhibition, however, is the way he includes just enough information about his subjects to help viewers connect even more strongly with them. In that sense, he is very much a part of the story himself.

In the photo from Montgomery, Alabama, we see a contemporary woman standing next to a statue. The statue is of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, and Venus, the subject of the photograph, is quoted as saying ​“every time I walk past here, I feel proud that a Southern Black woman’s courage started something huge.” But Marquinez’s image, and the subject’s expression in it, complicate this. Venus may be proud, but Marquinez lets us also see her stress. She exudes strength, capability, and conviction, but also worry and weariness.

“America Unfiltered” deploys a certain tension between the images and captions again and again to create deeper meaning. In another image, a woman named Lauren sits alone in a darkened coffee shop in Los Angeles, seemingly relaxing. But her quote reads: ​“I don’t feel like an American even though I was born here. People are surprised that I speak English well. I don’t feel welcomed here.”

In Hayleyville, Alabama, we meet Michael, a war veteran; he’s an older man now, with a floppy hat and a long gray beard. ​“What does it mean to be an American? I don’t know. No one has ever asked me that question before,” he’s quoted as saying. He then reveals that he has traveled a harrowing road through race relations. ​“When I was young, I considered becoming part of the KKK. I didn’t know better. But when I went to war, a Black guy stood up for me and saved my life. Since then, he became my brother.”

We meet a gun shop owner in Kingman, Ariz. who got into guns to try to connect with his addict father. We meet a delivery worker in New Jersey who fled the gangs of his home country to end up in a detention center in the U.S. We meet a woman who believes addicts become addicted to alleviate some deep inner personal pain. All the stories create a little friction with their accompanying images. It’s always more complicated than we think.

Crucial to all of the images is the subject’s total awareness of the camera. Usually the subject looks directly into the lens, and it isn’t always friendly. Occasionally the subject seems overtly hostile; in one portrait, of a woman in Jacksonville, the face is obscured by a blurry middle finger. But nowhere does Marquinez try to make himself invisible. He’s a subjective human being, trying to connect with his subjects, and letting the interaction take him wherever it does, until it lands on something maybe just a little bit revelatory.

The mission gets particularly intense in the images that come from the fact that the small ​“America Unfiltered” team found itself on the steps on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, unaware beforehand of what was to unfold there. An entire room of the show, complete with a small video, is dedicated to the images captured on that tumultuous day. Some of those images are quietly astonishing.

In so much news footage of the Capitol riot, we see a roiling mob, a mass of people pushing up stairs, through doorways, into hallways. We hear a thousand voices melting into an incoherent roar. That mob, as we know from hours upon hours of reporting and court testimony, on some level acted with one mind, or least with one goal, of disrupting the transfer of power from one president to another. How the people in that mob are typically depicted make it all too easy to make sweeping generalizations about them all — their reasons for showing up that day, their feelings as the riot unfolded, their concerns in the aftermath.

Marquinez’s images are an antidote to that. Without turning a blind eye to what the rioters did, he still trains his lens on individual faces. Through him, we see that the crowd was perhaps more diverse than we might imagine. More important, we see an dizzying array of emotions, from joy to rage, hope to despair, and a complex stew of all that and more in between. Even as he puts himself quite directly in harm’s way, he insists on his subjects’ humanity.

The photographer’s knowledge of the complexity at hand makes the optimism built into the project that much more brave. It reminds us that cynicism about the current state of the country is, in a way, its own kind of lazy thinking, a great way to sound smart while disengaging and not bothering with the details. Keeping hope, on the other hand, sounds simple but is in fact a move toward engagement, toward unearthing and diving into contradiction and difficulty, and not turning away when it gets hard. We can’t all drive around the country with cameras in hand to learn what makes strangers tick. But we can start with our block, and that’s something.

“America Unfiltered” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Aug. 4. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.