The Lost Art of Looking

I recently received a collection of official images from the organizers of the Xposure International Photography Festival, documenting my exhibit The Faces of Mexico: A Study in Truth and Perception in Sharjah, and over the coming weeks I'll be sharing them here. In an age where images are generated in seconds and consumed even faster, the act of truly looking has become a radical discipline.

To stand before a photograph, to let it hold you, to resist the scroll, is to practice something increasingly rare: sustained attention. The portraits in "The Faces of Mexico" demand this. They sit at the intersection of the real and the constructed, inviting questions about authenticity that our AI-mediated world makes newly urgent. When we can no longer assume an image was witnessed before it was made, the human act of looking becomes the final arbiter of meaning. The eye that pauses, that asks who is this person, that feels the weight of another life, that eye cannot be automated.

In a world drowning in synthetic vision, learning to look carefully may be one of the most profoundly human things we can still do.