“There are portraits that ask to be examined, and there are portraits that make examination a reciprocal act. This photograph belongs emphatically to the second kind. The young subject occupies almost the entire square frame, facing the camera without disguise, diversion, or explanatory gesture. Nothing intervenes between the viewer and the face. Yet this proximity does not confer mastery upon us. The longer we look, the more apparent it becomes that the gaze is being returned. We are not permitted the comfortable fiction of observing unseen. It is we who gradually become conspicuous.

The composition possesses an almost severe simplicity. The face is held frontally, its principal features aligned around a strong central axis. The bridge of the nose establishes the vertical structure, while the eyes create a horizontal line across the middle of the image. In less attentive hands, such symmetry could become clinical or merely diagrammatic. Here, however, the order is continually disturbed by living detail. The hair falls differently on either side; individual strands escape the larger arrangement; slight tonal variations move across the skin. Minute differences between the two halves of the face prevent formal balance from hardening into lifeless perfection.

The square format intensifies this effect. It provides no directional escape and no narrative space into which the subject might retreat. The face is neither approaching nor departing. It is simply present. Even the background offers almost no depth. Its pale, neutral surface merges at points with the lightest strands of hair, causing the outer contours of the head to soften while the darker roots, eyebrows, pupils, and nostrils draw attention inward. The image seems to gather itself around the eyes. Rather than surrounding the subject with an environment, the photographer has surrounded the face with silence.

Black and white is essential to this concentration. It does not function as a nostalgic embellishment, nor does it attempt to confer borrowed seriousness through association with photographic history. Its purpose is structural. Colour has been removed so that differences in luminosity can do the work. The pale hair and background establish an expansive upper register, while the darker features give the face its visual gravity. Between these extremes lies an unusually broad range of greys: the sheen of the forehead, the soft shadows beneath the eyes, the modelling around the nose, and the restrained definition of the lips. The face emerges gradually through tone rather than being carved out by aggressive contrast.

The eyes are the undeniable centre of the portrait, but their force does not arise from theatrical intensity. They are open and attentive without offering an easily named emotion. One could call the expression serious, vulnerable, cautious, or self-possessed, yet each description proves inadequate almost as soon as it is applied. The photograph wisely preserves this ambiguity. It refuses to turn a momentary expression into a declaration about character. The subject is not required to disclose an inner life merely because the camera has come close. What is given is presence, not confession.

This distinction is important. Contemporary portraiture often asks the face to perform immediately. A smile must communicate warmth; a lowered gaze must suggest introspection; an exaggerated stillness must signify defiance. Here, the mouth remains at rest and supplies no convenient emotional instruction. The subject does not reassure the viewer, seduce the viewer, or dramatize resistance to the viewer. The expression remains suspended before performance. That suspension gives the photograph its peculiar authority. We encounter someone who has not been converted into a message for our consumption.

The close crop removes nearly every customary source of biographical information. There is no visible setting, gesture, occupation, possession, or social role. Clothing is almost entirely absent from the frame. In this respect, the photograph recalls several historically impersonal forms: the identification picture, the photographic typology, the institutional record. Yet it refuses their reductive purpose. Bureaucratic images strip away context in order to make a person classifiable. This photograph strips away context in order to make classification impossible. The subject has been separated from anecdote, but not from individuality.

That individuality is sustained by the photograph’s treatment of physical detail. Skin retains texture. Stray hairs remain visible. Light gathers unevenly across the forehead and beneath the eyes. Nothing is presented as a defect to be corrected, nor as evidence in some fashionable rhetoric of imperfection. These are simply the material facts of a human face. The image does not congratulate itself for allowing them to remain. It understands that beauty is not achieved by erasing evidence of life.

Within Beauty Knows No Limits, the portrait therefore proposes beauty as something more demanding than prettiness and more durable than compliance with a visual standard. Its beauty resides in the coherence between form and presence: the centred face, the steady gaze, the unembellished surface, and the refusal to solicit approval. The subject is beautiful not because the photograph claims to have discovered a flawless arrangement of features, but because it permits singularity to remain intact. Beauty here is not a prize awarded after comparison. It is the visible consequence of being regarded without being diminished.

Its place within Faces of the Future is equally compelling. The future is usually represented through spectacle: illuminated cities, new machines, anonymous crowds, or faces polished into frictionless symbols of optimism. This photograph rejects that vocabulary. It reminds us that the future will not arrive as an abstraction. It will be inhabited by particular people, carrying private histories, uncertainties, convictions, and forms of intelligence that cannot be read from their appearances. The young are too often treated as blank surfaces upon which older generations project either hope or alarm. This subject accepts neither burden. The gaze does not promise to fulfil our expectations, nor does it ask permission to exceed them.

The two series meet at precisely this point. Beauty knows no limits because a human being cannot be exhausted by the categories imposed upon appearance. The face belongs to the future because its meaning has not yet been settled by those looking at it. What makes the portrait memorable is not youth alone, nor symmetry, nor even the remarkable directness of the eyes. It is the sensation of encountering a life whose possibilities remain sovereign. The photograph brings us extraordinarily close, only to remind us that closeness is not possession. We may look, and we may be moved, but we are not entitled to conclude.

The future, in this image, does not smile for our reassurance. It looks directly back.”

- Élodie Vasseur

Paris, France

R9 Media Photo Collective

There is a persistent temptation when confronted with a young face to search immediately for signs of what will come next. We look for confidence, intelligence, beauty, ambition, or perhaps evidence of some future success that will retrospectively justify our attention. Such habits reveal more about the observer than the subject. They are attempts to transform a human being into a prediction.

This photograph resists that impulse.

The young man before us appears neither triumphant nor defeated. He does not present himself as a hero, a rebel, a celebrity, or a victim. He offers no narrative at all. Instead, he confronts the camera with a directness that feels increasingly uncommon in contemporary portraiture.

The first thing one notices is the gaze. It is not aggressive. It does not seek dominance over the viewer, nor does it retreat into self-consciousness. It simply remains. The eyes neither perform nor conceal. They occupy the narrow territory between certainty and uncertainty that belongs almost exclusively to youth.

This distinction matters.

Much contemporary photography has become obsessed with expression. Portraits are expected to communicate something immediately legible. We are invited to recognize confidence, vulnerability, outrage, joy, irony, or melancholy within a fraction of a second. Such images function less as portraits than as visual declarations.

The strength of this photograph lies in its refusal to declare anything.

Instead, the image asks us to linger.

As one continues to observe, other details emerge. The face retains traces of adolescence around the eyes and mouth, while the structure of adulthood has already begun to establish itself. The faint beard growth, the length of the hair, the subtle asymmetries of expression, all suggest a person still engaged in the quiet process of self-construction.

The future often arrives in precisely this manner.

Not through dramatic transformation but through accumulation.

One becomes oneself gradually.

The monochrome treatment contributes significantly to this effect. By removing the distraction of color, the photograph directs attention toward form, texture, and presence. Light settles across the forehead and cheeks with remarkable gentleness. The tonal range remains restrained, avoiding both excessive contrast and sentimental softness. The result is a portrait that feels observational rather than interpretive.

The photographer appears uninterested in imposing meaning upon the subject.

That restraint deserves recognition.

Throughout the history of portraiture, the greatest images have often emerged from a willingness to allow ambiguity to remain intact. The photographer does not solve the mystery of the individual. Instead, he records its existence.

Here, the plain background becomes an essential component of the composition. Nothing competes with the face. There are no environmental clues, no fashionable accessories, no symbols intended to establish identity. The absence of contextual information produces an unusual effect. We are compelled to confront the individual before us rather than the social categories through which we typically understand people.

This young man could belong to almost any profession, any city, any social class.

He is specific and universal simultaneously.

That duality forms the philosophical center of the image.

When we speak about "the future," we often imagine institutions, technologies, governments, economies, and cultural movements. Yet every future ultimately arrives through individuals. History is inherited by people not much older than the subject of this photograph. They become doctors, teachers, artists, engineers, parents, laborers, writers, and citizens. They inherit problems they did not create and opportunities they did not design.

Before all of those roles exist, however, there is simply the face.

There is the person.

This portrait reminds us of that fundamental reality.

The direct frontal composition further reinforces the image's democratic quality. The camera occupies neither a position of superiority nor inferiority. Photographer and subject appear to meet on equal terms. Such equilibrium is surprisingly difficult to achieve. Too often portraits either elevate their subjects into icons or reduce them to objects of examination.

Neither occurs here.

Instead, we encounter an individual standing at the threshold of an unknowable future.

Perhaps this is why the photograph feels quietly moving.

Older generations frequently speak about youth in abstract terms. They discuss trends, statistics, crises, and opportunities. What disappears amid such conversations is the simple fact that every generation begins as a collection of singular human beings whose futures remain unwritten.

The young man in this image carries no visible prophecy.

We do not know what victories await him.

We do not know what disappointments will shape him.

We do not know what convictions he will acquire, what losses he will endure, or what wisdom he may eventually possess.

All of that remains hidden.

And yet, paradoxically, that uncertainty is precisely what makes the photograph so compelling.

The image captures a moment before conclusion.

A moment before certainty.

A moment before experience settles permanently into character.

For that reason, this portrait serves as an excellent beginning to ‘Faces of the Future.’ It reminds us that the future does not first appear in institutions or ideologies. It appears in faces. It appears in ordinary individuals standing quietly before the camera, carrying within them countless unrealized possibilities.

The photograph asks for nothing more than attention.

In return, it offers something increasingly rare: the opportunity to witness a human being at the precise point where possibility remains greater than memory.

- É. Vasseur

For more work: R9 Media Photo Collective

We talked about their most epic activism adventures, what it feels like to be punished by the legal system for your commitment to the animal cause, the many countries that have banned our guests and much much more.

Visit the Captain Paul Watson Foundation's website and support OPERATION KRILL WARS, a bold mission to safeguard the Antarctic ecosystem from the relentless industrial assault of fishing vessels. The Captain Paul Watson Foundation needs you, the whales need you. https://www.paulwatson...

Connect with Gary on social media. Since coming back from retirement, he has been very active fundraising for sanctuaries, spreading veganism with Anonymous for the Voiceless and supporting and inspiring fellow animal rights activists. Instagram: https://www.instagram....

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“All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by ye…

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Executive Summary

The United States spends substantially more on military and defense-related activities than most developed democracies. In 2025, broad U.S. military and defense-related spending was …

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The photograph was taken aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 during a transatlantic crossing from New York to Southampton in 1979 by the photographer Lisa Howe-Ebright. The man seated at the casino table, c…

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“Rededicate 250,” a free public event that took place at the National Mall in Washington, DC on Sunday, was billed as a day of “jubilee, prayer, and thanksgiving.” …

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Title: Closed System Experiment

Artist: Dragan Velimir Kostić

Red Sharpie marker ink on sketching paper.

Photographed by the R9 Media Collective with a Leica Q3 43.

Prints available on request.

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A refrigerator still holds what someone intended to return to. Containers are stacked without care, but not without purpose. Drinks remain half-considered. A fre…

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There is a tendency, when confronted with works such as these, to describe them as studies—as preparatory, provisio…

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What strikes me first is not the subject, but the distance—the quiet, almost reverential distance this image insists upon. The figures are small, nearly swallowed by the geometry of the observation d…

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Original photo courtesy the photographer:

Lisa Howe-Ebright

Taken on a Leica M on Ilford film in 1979 at the Musée du Louvre-Paris, France

In 1979, inside the august corridors of the Musée du Louvre, Lisa Howe-Ebright made a photograph on a Leica M using Ilford film. It is, at first glance, a modest image: a man in a fedora, turning slightly, his face illuminated by the soft interior light of the museum. The paintings behind him recede into blur. The Louvre, that immense theater of cultural validation, becomes backdrop rather than protagonist.

This inversion is not accidental.

The museum is constructed to direct our gaze toward sanctioned masterpieces — toward what history has already approved. Yet Howe-Ebright’s frame refuses that directive. The subject does not gaze at the art. Nor does the camera. Instead, the photograph attends to the living presence situated within the institutional space. The canon stands behind him; consciousness stands before it.

There is something quietly radical in that orientation.

The Ilford grain lends the image its particular tactility — a silver atmosphere that breathes rather than insists. The tonal compression of film produces a softness around the edges of the gallery walls, allowing the fedora’s clean line to assert itself against the architecture. The subject’s glance is neither staged nor defensive. It suggests awareness — of the photographer, of the moment, perhaps even of being observed within a space dedicated to observation.

Decades later, the image is rephotographed on a Leica Q3 43 and lightly edited — undertaken with the full permission of Lisa Howe-Ebright. This detail is essential. The act is not extraction; it is collaboration across time. Rephotography here does not erase authorship but extends it. It acknowledges origin while introducing mediation.

The digital sensor renders micro-contrast differently than silver halide. Blacks settle with a different authority. Edges clarify. The grain, once inherent to emulsion, becomes an artifact of history, now reframed. Yet what remains untouched is the psychological nucleus: the eyes. They carry forward with undiminished presence, bridging 1979 and the present moment.

Rephotograph of original 1979 photograph

Courtesy: R9 Media Photo Collective

Photographer: W. Hazlitt

Studio Assistant: A. Smessaert

Video courtesy: R9 Media Photo Collective

What emerges is a layered authorship — not competitive but sequential. The original image belongs to its era: a late-1970s museum, a young man caught between looking and being looked at. The rephotograph belongs to ours: a time preoccupied with archives, with memory, with recontextualization. In bringing the image forward, the contemporary gesture does not claim ownership; it claims conversation.

It is also worth noting that the Louvre itself functions as silent co-author. Museums are institutions of hierarchy. They determine which objects merit preservation, which narratives endure. Yet in this photograph, the institution is destabilized. The living subject eclipses the paintings. The canon fades into bokeh. The hierarchy dissolves.

To turn away from the art on the wall and toward the person in the room is not merely compositional. It is philosophical.

The image reminds us that history is not only what hangs in frames. It is also the unnoticed figure passing through the gallery, the fleeting glance, the human presence temporarily intersecting with monumental culture. Rephotography amplifies this realization. By reintroducing the image into contemporary circulation — with permission, with acknowledgment — it asserts that photographs themselves are living entities. They accrue meaning as they move through time.

This is not nostalgia. It is continuity.

In the end, the most striking element remains the subject’s orientation. His body is angled away from the masterpieces, yet his eyes meet the camera. He stands between centuries of art and the immediacy of the present gaze. He becomes, briefly, the axis upon which time rotates.

And perhaps this is the quiet thesis of the work: that the canon is stable only until someone turns away from it — and looks elsewhere.

- Élodie Vasseur

Paris, France 2026

R9 Media Photo Collective

https://vero.co/r9media

Michael Viktor Kilarjian

Associate Editor, The Intelligencer

Additional commentary from:

Tomás Arancibia Lozano

“What is being described here is not an accident of culture but the function of a system. Contemporary literature in the United States — and by extension much of the Anglophone world — is not merely written by the privileged; it is filtered, refined, and authenticated by an institutional machine that reproduces its own class composition.

The associate editor’s critique exposes an uncomfortable truth: the modern literary marketplace is governed less by organic discovery than by credentialed validation. Degrees, fellowships, residencies, awards — these are not incidental biographical details. They are the passport stamps that grant entry into visibility. A writer’s authority is now pre-certified before a reader ever encounters a sentence.

Historically, literary production has often been entangled with class — one need only consider figures such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Emily Dickinson. But what distinguishes our era is bureaucratization. Privilege has been formalized into institutional process. It is no longer merely social positioning; it is a pipeline.

The invocation of Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is not a personal indictment of their talent. It is an illustration of the pattern. Elite universities. MFAs. Prestigious fellowships. Award circuits. These pathways interlock. They produce not only writers, but legitimacy. When such writers depict economic stagnation or existential drift, the cultural establishment receives the portrayal as authoritative — not because it emerges from lived precarity, but because it has passed through approved channels.

This is the literary machine: a self-reinforcing network of MFA programs, grant committees, critics, academic departments, and publishing houses that largely draw from the same socio-economic corridor. It decides what is staged, what is reviewed, what is assigned to students. It determines which narratives become canonical and which remain invisible.

The defense of this system is always meritocratic. The best work rises. But “the best” is defined within institutions that privilege certain forms of polish, certain aesthetic vocabularies, certain intellectual postures — all of which are more accessible to those already equipped with time, financial stability, and educational access. The retail worker writing at night, the warehouse employee with no MFA, the autodidact without institutional affiliation — these voices may exist, but they do not circulate. Visibility is curated.

From Bolivia, where literary production often unfolds outside formal patronage structures, the pattern is striking. When the gates are guarded by those trained within the same academies, diversity of experience narrows even as diversity of theme expands superficially. We are told that literature speaks for everyone, yet the arbiters of literary prestige are drawn from a remarkably small band of society.

The associate editor’s argument ultimately lands here: the contemporary literary world confuses accreditation with authority and pedigree with profundity. The cost is not merely aesthetic dissatisfaction. The cost is cultural omission. Entire strata of lived experience remain uncanonized because they lack institutional endorsement.

The question, then, is simple and destabilizing: Who decides what we read? The answer, at present, is not “the people.” It is the machine.”

- Tomás Arancibia Lozano

La Paz, Bolivia

Having rephotographed these forty-year-old 35mm prints on the Leica Q3 43, I found myself less interested in preservation than in re-encounter. Time had already completed its …

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The central gesture functions as a grotesquely overdetermined emblem of modern agency: an act performed compulsively, almost dutifully, stripped of flourish and therefore swollen with meaning. It is not expressive in the traditional sense; it is procedural. The subject does not appear to choose so much as comply, enacting a script whose origin lies elsewhere—bureaucratic, cultural, cosmic. The absurdity emerges not from exaggeration of movement, but from the grim sincerity with which the movement is repeated or sustained. This is how systems behave when internalized.

Stylistically, the austerity is doing the heavy lifting. The restraint of framing and pacing refuses catharsis. There is no release, no punchline, no visual escalation that would grant the viewer permission to laugh outright. Instead, the work cultivates a dead zone where meaning accumulates without resolution. The camera’s neutrality is its cruelty: by declining to editorialize, it implicates the viewer as a silent witness, perhaps even an accomplice.

Symbolically, the piece operates as a maximalist allegory masquerading as minimalism. What might initially register as a single, isolated act metastasizes into a portrait of institutional absurdity at scale. The gesture becomes labor, then ritual, then doctrine. It is impossible not to read it as a send-up of authority structures that demand participation without comprehension—political, religious, economic, even aesthetic. The body is present, but autonomy is theoretical. The will exists, but only as an afterimage.

There is also something faintly eschatological at work. The action feels less like progress than maintenance of a failing order, a kind of end-times busywork. The subject persists not because the act works, but because stopping would require acknowledging its futility. In this sense, the video stages absurdity not as comedy but as endurance. The joke, if there is one, is cosmic and unamused.

Taken as a whole, the piece reads as a mock-solemn monument to compliance, delivered with such seriousness that parody becomes indistinguishable from diagnosis. It does not ridicule its subject; it treats it with the grave respect reserved for inevitabilities. The absurdity is total precisely because it is never announced. One is left with the uneasy suspicion that this is not exaggeration at all, but reportage—an accurate record of how meaning behaves once it has been fully outsourced.”

- Dr. Alastair Penwyth-Hume

The brand new BMX zine for Asheville, NC has dropped. Grab your copy now!

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