Portraits of the Viewer
February 22 – March 5, 1980
In the late 1970s, I moved to the Pacific Northwest to attend Evergreen State College. During this period, I explored urban street photography for the first time. I was drawn to meeting and relating to strangers. I quickly became conscious that my presence of mind greatly affected how potential subjects from all walks of life would respond to my interest in photographing them.
Unfortunately, I do not have access to many of those early images from that time, but maybe these few can represent the work I showed at Blue Sky Gallery in 1980. The project was titled “Portraits of the Viewer.” I quickly realized responses to subjects from various walks of life were dramatically colored by the viewer’s preconceived notions and judgments of others. While interacting with the subjects and making the photographs, I found great interest in working with everyone and treating them equitably. At the very least, I attempted to be fair and just in my approach to the strangers in my youthful mind and actions. I was not naïve to believe I did so without any bias. Still, I was striving to and truly wanted to treat every stranger I met with a similar level of respectful appreciation. As one can imagine for a young artist, the process of making the images was engaging and challenging for me, but I envisioned the presentation to be thought-provoking for the viewers as well.
Over four decades ago, the process of making the images for this project grew
from watching the degree to which people’s responses to images are so often colored by their preconceived notions of the subjects. At the time, it was new to me and troubling that viewers would assume I had the same beliefs they did regarding the subjects without the presence of anything in the images to convey that.
John Willis is a photographer whose personal work and teaching typically fall within the social documentary genre, engaging the communities he works within. He considers volunteer and service community engagement work an important part of his life.
Willis is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography, 2010 and an Open Society Institute Community Engagement Grant, among other awards and grants. His photographs are in numerous permanent collections, among them the Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, J. Paul Getty Museum, Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Whitney Museum of American Art. Willis’ books include Mni Wiconi/Water Is Life: Honoring the Water Protectors at Standing Rock and Everywhere in the Ongoing Struggle for Indigenous
Sovereignty, Views from the Reservation, Recycled Realities (with Tom Young) and Requiem for the Innocent, El Paso and Beyond, a collaboration with writer Robin Behn and composer Matan Rubenstein. The project has also become a short experimental film designed for art installation. His work with First Nations people began in 1992 when he was introduced to Eugene Reddest Comes Out First, an Oglala Lakota elder. His appreciation for the Lakota and other tribes and their beautiful living traditions stems partly from the fact that his family immigrated to the US in the early 20th century to escape persecution, leaving him void of many cultural traditions.