Gregg Evans: We Only See The Sky As It Was

Gregg Evans: We Only See The Sky As It Was by Grant GillMay 23, 2013

Portrait week continues…today’s post written by Grant Gill

Gregg Evans and I met almost a year ago at Chicago’s annual Filter Photo Festival. As I browsed through his portfolio, I was confronted with bold, suggestive portraits of men. Each photograph evoked a different scenario, hinting at nostalgia and lust, but it was the gaze of these men that became the constant theme. Gregg’s approach to the male gaze works in a unique way that speaks both about the photographer and about his male models.

Gregg Evans is a photographer living and working in Chicago, IL. He holds an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA in Photography from S.U.N.Y Purchase. Interested in the similarities and differences between the dynamics of power in photography and romantic or sexual encounters, Evans creates images laden with tension between dominance and submission, and inhibition and brashness. Recent exhibitions include New York’s White Columns gallery, Envoy Enterprises and United Photo Industries, as well as Northern Trust, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Ebersmoore Gallery in Chicago. He likes milk shakes in almost any weather condition, Roseanne, and My Bloody Valentine.

We Only See The Sky As It Was

For a moment I step away from the camera and look you in the eyes, unmediated by a screen. “What’s wrong?” you ask me, only a few short steps away, just beyond the warm glow of daylight. “Are you not getting what you want?” The tenor of your voice seems lower than usual, more deliberate, like the carefully placed steps of a man wandering in blinding snow.

It is Sunday afternoon, and unseasonably warm for December. You lie quietly in my bed, grey jersey reflecting light onto your legs and chest like diffused ripples of water. Your left hand rests somewhere between the V of your ribcage and your chest, your right hand tucked defen- sively between two pillows. Your eyes are awash with anticipation, the uncertainty of what’s to come. I sense a shift in your mood, a weari- ness that I don’t fully understand. I take off my shirt.

Your eyes dart from the lens to my chest, from the camera to the tattoo that covers my stomach. We no longer know where to look.

My work examines the tension between representation and presentation, between the traditionally singular desire inherent in the photographer’s gaze, and the mutual desires involved in cruising, one night stands, and other casual encounters. Through the use of models met on cruising and dating sites, as well as strangers I approach on the street, I create images which are both confrontational and infused with intimacy; of figures at once caught in the act and looking to engage in it. By constructing images rife with sexual tension, I complicate traditional depictions of desire, blurring the line between what is a genuine connection and what is only momentary.