I have never known how to take Bruce Gilden. But I've never really thought hard about why.

It was with this unresolved feeling that I went to see an exhibition of Faces at Fotografiska, Berlin, a few weeks ago. Fotografiska itself seemed to set the mood: its stairwell graffiti, masquerading as art, provided an apt, if slightly too knowing, backdrop for what was to follow.

Before my visit I had read around Gilden's Faces project. Unlike his flash-aided, in-your-face street photography, the portrait subjects here were willing sitters — a distinction that matters, as we'll see.

Sean O'Hagan, photography correspondent for the Guardian, was not persuaded by it. ‘Gilden's mugshots are’, he concluded, ‘exactly that — the result of being mugged by his camera’. ‘I feel uncomfortable as a viewer,’ O'Hagan wrote, ‘not because of the poverty or abuse etched on to the landscapes of these faces, but because their perceived ugliness is paraded as a kind of latter-day freak show.’ For O'Hagan, Gilden had simply dehumanised his subjects.

© Tony Cearns, 2026, The Gilden exhibition, Fotografiska, Berlin

The street photographer Joel Meyerowitz went considerably further:

‘He's a fucking bully. I despise the work, I despise the attitude — he's an aggressive bully and all the pictures look alike because he only has one idea: 'I'm gonna embarrass you, I'm going to humiliate you.' I'm sorry, but no.’

© Tony Cearns 2026 ‘Gilden’s ‘Faces’. Images owned by Bruce Gilden.

Such reactions turned out to be entirely predictable, as I was to discover for myself. Shock and awe is how I'd describe the initial experience. The term is military in origin — the use of overwhelming force and spectacular display to paralyse an adversary's perception and destroy their will to resist. That is what Gilden delivers, at least at first: a kind of visual paralysis.

But once you push through this, and spend time with the work, something shifts. The default labels that sprang to mind on first contact — ugly, grotesque, dehumanising — begin to give way to something more thought-inducing. You become inured to those faces. Prolonged exposure dulls the shock; what initially appalled becomes merely visible. And then, slowly, something more interesting starts to emerge.

Loring Knoblauch, writing in Collector Daily after the Why These? retrospective at Fotografiska New York, put it well:

‘As I stood with these images longer, I started to wonder whether the fact that Gilden has so consistently pressed exactly on our points of discomfort is partly a result of our own unwillingness to wrestle with certain human realities. 'Good' or 'not good' hardly seem like modifiers that can encompass these pictures — and maybe that's exactly the point.’

And Chris Klatell, in his essay for the book, found something more positive still in the faces themselves: they stare or glare directly at us through the lens. They look alternately defiant, proud, angry, humble. As if to say: Yeah, sure, this is the way I look. Why should it matter to you?

O'Hagan's and Meyerowitz's charge is ultimately an ethical one rather than an aesthetic one: that Gilden has exploited his subjects. It's worth pausing here, though. As Martin Parr observed in his conversation with Gilden, the street photograph — or the ‘sneaky pic’, as Parr cheerfully calls it — is typically candid, taken without the subject's knowledge or consent. That form of photography is, if anything, more ethically fraught than portraits made with a willing sitter, however hard those portraits may be to face. It is, incidentally, the mode on which Meyerowitz built much of his own career.

So where does this leave me?

Visual art, for me, functions as a kind of conceptual engineering — an opportunity for pictures to expand on my provincially-lived, idiosyncratic world. Against that measure, Gilden's Faces more than deliver: they make me think, and think uncomfortably. As for the ethics, I'm not in a position to judge, not being party to any of Gilden's conversations with his sitters. I will say this much: I have never believed in the neoclassical fiction of a pure market in which buyers and sellers negotiate from positions of equal power. I suspect Gilden had considerably more to gain from his subjects than they from him. But I can't know that for certain.

Gilden’s Faces

Berlin 2026