Over a span of 15 years, I experienced the heart-wrenching loss of my entire immediate family. Internally shattered by the loss of home, I was tasked with finding a new purpose to keep moving forward. Photography helped me ignore everything outside the frame, as it is easier to deal with a rectangle than the totality of life around it.

While documenting the most extravagant homes and art exhibitions throughout South Florida, I became a master at capturing success for everyone, but myself. My professional life became framing, sharing, and polishing everyone else’s "dream come true,” while my own life was falling apart. In Albert Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus," he presents the concept of the absurd hero who confronts anguish, and embraces his destiny as uniquely his own. Instead of succumbing to the anguish of pushing a rock up the hill, I decided to insert myself into the dreams I was creating for others. While the real estate agents were distracted in the adjacent rooms, I repurposed the luxury decorum as a stage to reclaim my own identity.

The portraits I began to create in the homes of strangers started to reveal my unconscious desires and obscured emotions. I remember showing the Intimate Stranger series to my family and friends, like post cards from travels to distant lands. While this work was not without risk, according to Camus, “revolt defines the absurd hero” and is a central component of what makes photography exciting for me. Somewhere in between the pain and grandeur, I unapologetically became the focus of my own gaze. Through the use of photography, I was able to transform grief into curiosity, ultimately documenting the process in which I became free.

https://artmedia.gallery/artists/artist/zachary-balber-1

“Photography is not like painting,” Henri Cartier-Bresson observed in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second… the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” Cartier-Bresson’s formulation of the decisive moment has long shaped the canon of modernist photography, privileging the singular instant where form and meaning converge. Yet, my work diverges from this ideal: rather than the pursuit of a single decisive instant, my practice is attuned to the accumulation of encounters, the repetition of daily passage, and the layered temporality of urban life.

Driving through Little Haiti, Overtown, and Downtown Miami on my way to school and work, I began to see these routes not merely as detours around traffic, but as sites of sustained observation. The people, colors, and textures of these neighborhoods entered my photographic vocabulary, demanding a visual response. Here, the decisive moment gives way to a more durational gaze—an acknowledgment that the city reveals itself not in isolated instants, but in rhythms, patterns, and continuities of lived experience.

In this sense, the project inevitably enters into dialogue with Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), a work that redefined photographic seeing by exposing the fissures, contradictions, and alienations of mid-20th century American life. Frank’s America was fractured, dissonant, caught between myth and reality. My deviation lies in charting a different historical condition: the cultural integration and hybridity characteristic of the 21st century. Where Frank revealed the estrangement of individuals within a vast and unequal nation, my images consider Miami as a site where cultural collisions—immigrant, Black, Caribbean, Latino, Anglo—generate new forms of belonging, however unstable.

Coming from Pittsburgh, a monochrome steel town marked by its industrial past, Miami confronted me with a chromatic and cultural excess that was at once intoxicating and unsettling. My first encounters were not framed by welcome but by difference: “What are you looking at, Cracker?” In that address, the city announced itself as a place where vision was already entangled with race, history, and power. To photograph here was to acknowledge that looking is never innocent.

If Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock haunts the work, it is because his verses articulate the uncertainty of entering into unfamiliar social worlds: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.” Like Eliot’s speaker, I am both within and outside, both observer and implicated participant. In photography, too, there is always the preparation of a face to meet the faces one encounters, a negotiation of self and other, visibility and concealment.

Thus, while indebted to Cartier-Bresson and Frank, my work departs from their modernist paradigms. Rather than the purity of the decisive moment or the alienated vision of postwar America, it insists on hybridity, exchange, and contested belonging as defining conditions of contemporary visual culture.

Window Shopping is a portrait series that confronts the transactional undercurrents of the art world during Miami’s Art Basel. Taking its cue from the economy of sex work, the project stages a parallel between the commodification of bodies and the commodification of artistic labor. The weary, disenchanted expressions captured in these portraits expose the exhaustion beneath the spectacle—faces that, like the art itself, are consumed, bartered, and discarded within a relentless market cycle.

Historically, artists from Otto Dix to Nan Goldin have unveiled the intersections of desire, commerce, and exploitation, portraying subjects whose identities are entangled with systems of power and consumption. Window Shopping extends this lineage by refracting the glamour of the art fair through the lens of solicitation, where artist, dealer, and collector mirror the dynamics of sex work: exhibition becomes display, acquisition becomes transaction, and value becomes inseparable from the theater of desire.

The project itself moved beyond photography into the realm of social performance. At the opening, I invited the very pimps and prostitutes depicted in the work to attend—without informing the audience. Within the white cube, they enacted their roles: pimps flirted brazenly with collectors’ wives, while the women propositioned anyone willing to listen. This collision of social worlds collapsed metaphor into lived experience, turning the gallery into a stage for the art of solicitation itself. The audience, unaware, became both witness and participant in a performance of complicity.

The Hebrew word Tamim translates as “pure”, “unblemished”, and “complete”. Photographer Zack Balber offers his unique, incongruous twist on Tamim’s denotation. Using portrait photography as his vehicle, Balber intimately uncovers the camouflaged identity of some of Judaism’s most unfamiliar Jews.

 Born and raised in gritty inner-city neighborhoods throughout the country, both the photographer and many of his subjects were void of Jewish role models. Instead of praising their ancestry, they concealed their culture behind tattoos and vanity in a pursuit to assimilate.

Relocated to the close-knit Jewish community in Miami, Balber began to reconnect with his roots. During his cultural rediscovery, he encountered men who were similarly unorthodox yet retained that indefinable Jewish spark. Interestingly, when approached with the opportunity to be photographed as Jews, these ordinarily recalcitrant men let go of their powerful exteriors and embraced the vulnerability of portrait photography. When the participants donned the yarmulke that Zack Balber wore for his Bar Mitzvah, each of them expressed a spiritual reconnection to their culture, captured within these photographs.

Balber’s portraits of men who are ostensibly Tamim--proud, unashamed, and whole—exquisitely reveal their insecurity, vulnerability, and fear of exposure. Although their appearances may initially distract us from their inner reality, the tattoos and bling cannot obscure their heritage of Hebrew day school, spiritual mentors, or even the Holocaust... In an introspective discussion on his body of work, Balber noted, “that religion is far

more than skin deep and that a connection with G-d can always be reignited.” 

Working in Downtown Miami, I was repeatedly confronted by requests—for money, cigarettes, or food. These daily encounters underscored how I was seen: not as an individual, but as a resource, a conduit for capital. My instinct was often to ignore, to turn away, to preserve distance. This project emerged as a way to disrupt that asymmetry, to recast the encounter within a framework of exchange rather than extraction.

Each request became an opportunity for negotiation. When asked for a dollar or a cigarette, I responded with my own request: a portrait. When questioned about what I would do with the image, I asked in turn, what will you do with the dollar? In this act, the dynamic of giving and taking was reframed into a reciprocal transaction. The portrait became currency, a counterweight to the symbolic economy in which homelessness is both hyper-visible in public space and invisible within cultural institutions.

Placed in an art-historical context, the series recalls documentary traditions from Jacob Riis to Diane Arbus, yet diverges from their one-directional gaze. It also resonates with practices of institutional critique—from Hans Haacke’s exposure of economic structures to Santiago Sierra’s confrontations with labor and exploitation—where the artwork is not only an image but a record of social and economic exchange. By insisting on barter, the project reveals the power dynamics embedded in both philanthropy and representation: the homeless body as spectacle, the artist as mediator, and the institution as beneficiary.

What results is not a humanitarian gesture but a critical proposition. The portraits stand as evidence of an uneasy economy, where value circulates unevenly, and where art itself risks reproducing the very hierarchies it seeks to expose. In reframing the transaction, the series asks: who profits from visibility, who controls representation, and how might exchange be reimagined when both sides must give something up?

Imagine the most disquieting breach of intimacy: a camera left on a bar table in downtown Miami, discovered not by its owner but by strangers. What arrived to me was a memory card in an envelope marked simply: “Enjoy these images, do whatever you want with them.” Inside were 525 photographs—an extended chronicle of a well-endowed young man and an older woman, charting their travels from Miami Beach to ancient ruins.

The initial shock of voyeurism quickly gave way to a more complex encounter. Moving through the archive, the figures themselves became less central than the experience of consuming their intimacy as an anonymous outsider. The images oscillated between erotic display and banal leisure, producing what John Berger might describe as the slippage between the seen and the known. Detached from their original owners, the photographs transformed into an unmoored narrative—an intimate life stripped of consent, now circulating as cultural artifact.

As an editor, accustomed to refining images for fashion, advertising, real estate, and fine art, I found myself inhabiting a new role: the editorial voyeur. In re-sequencing, cropping, and intervening, I began to deconstruct these photographs as both aesthetic material and social document. In this sense, the project enters a critical lineage that includes Sophie Calle’s explorations of surveillance and trespass, Christian Boltanski’s appropriations of anonymous archives, and Sherrie Levine’s radical questions of authorship. Each suggests that the photographic image is never innocent, but always embedded in networks of power, circulation, and control.

This series began with a fascination for the gaze of mannequins and the uneasy question of what differentiates their presence in photographs from that of a living subject. Storefront mannequins, particularly those staged in luxury boutiques, embody an idealized physique and a codified fashion image. Their faces, though fixed and inanimate, bear a haunting resonance—eerily echoing the expressions I often observed within Miami’s nightlife and high society.

The intrigue deepened when I received a mannequin catalog in the mail, meticulously classifying bodies into categories of style, posture, and desirability. The taxonomy of these artificial figures revealed how commerce reduces the complexity of human form and identity to legible, consumable types.

This body of work engages with traditions that interrogate the gaze, objectification, and the artificial body—from Hans Bellmer’s unsettling doll constructions to Cindy Sherman’s staged self-portraits, and from Claude Cahun’s destabilization of gender to Laurie Simmons’ tableaux of dolls and mannequins. Like these artists, I use the inanimate figure as a proxy through which to explore desire, repression, and the cultural machinery that produces “ideal” bodies.

The mannequins operate here as both mirror and mask. They reflect a society that venerates surfaces, classifies beauty, and eroticizes the domestic, while also providing a space where memory and fantasy can be externalized and examined. In their silence, they speak to the complexities of looking: how we see others, how we are seen, and how the act of looking itself is entangled with desire, power, and loss.

Diane Arbus once remarked, “Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and do what I wanted to do. The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed.” In many ways, the billboard operates under a similar license—an unchecked authority that saturates public space with its images, projecting a vision of desire and success without ever asking for consent. Advertising does not request attention; it demands it, insinuating itself into the subconscious even when we believe we have “blocked it out.”

America’s Bulletin Board examines this omnipresent visual field by juxtaposing the language of the billboard with the casual immediacy of the snapshot. Billboards promise an idealized reality—glossy models, catchy slogans, and hyper-saturated colors—that reduce lived experience to consumable fragments. In contrast, the snapshot, historically dismissed as amateur or accidental, resists perfection; it captures fleeting, imperfect, and often banal moments of everyday life.

This tension recalls the Pop provocations of Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, who appropriated the monumental scale and visual codes of advertising, as well as the critical strategies of Barbara Kruger and the Pictures Generation, who exposed how images mediate identity and desire. At the same time, it draws on the raw authenticity of Nan Goldin or Garry Winogrand, who elevated the snapshot aesthetic into a form of cultural critique. When billboard and snapshot collide, the result is a dissonant visual conversation: one image prescribes how life should appear, while the other reveals how life is lived.

Driving from Miami to North Carolina, I collected fragments of this American visual landscape. By placing candid snapshots against the seductions of outdoor advertising, America’s Bulletin Board seeks to unveil how billboards function as a distorted cultural language—part surrealist dream, part authoritarian directive. They offer us not the complexity of human experience, but its reduction: life as slogan, body as commodity, memory as campaign. The series insists that in order to see clearly, we must place the spectacle of advertising in tension with the accidental truths of the everyday snapshot

When I later inherited a family heirloom of Venezuelan vintage Playboys as an adult, I was confronted not only with the material presence of these magazines, but with the memory of my own premature exposure to sexual imagery. As a boy, I had encountered such images before I could fully comprehend their implications, and my instinct was to intervene—scribbling new hair colors, altering backgrounds, attempting to disrupt the glossy surfaces of desire with gestures of play. With White-Out and permanent markers, I instinctively began to intervene—scribbling new hair colors, altering backgrounds, disrupting the glossy surface of desire with gestures of play. These early acts of modification became a way of reasserting agency against a visual language that overwhelmed me.

Within an art historical lineage, this work sits at the intersection of appropriation and revision. Much as artists from the Pictures Generation—such as Richard Prince or Cindy Sherman—have reconfigured the saturated codes of mass media, these interventions attempt to reframe the spectacle of sexuality as something unstable, porous, and open to reinterpretation. The scribbles are not mere vandalism, but an unconscious strategy of balance: a child’s attempt to neutralize overstimulation by remaking what was given into something more manageable, even intimate.

This body of work recognizes that premature exposure to sexual imagery has a distorting effect—it accelerates curiosity while bypassing comprehension, leaving a residue of confusion and fascination. By revisiting those images now through the lens of art, I seek to restore a measure of equilibrium. The altered magazines become both artifact and palimpsest: simultaneously testaments to the excesses of erotic spectacle and records of a young mind’s effort to reclaim its own imaginative space.

In this way, the work acknowledges the double-bind of concealment and exposure—echoing Gulliver’s dialogue with the Houyhnhnms. What is hidden, what is revealed, and why? The marks intervene in the glossy certainties of pornography, not to censor, but to complicate: to reimagine sexuality as something that can be reshaped, resisted, and ultimately reclaimed as part of a larger narrative of identity.

Desecrate invokes the act of stripping away sanctity—of exposing that which is held sacred as constructed, fragile, and open to rupture. In contemporary visual culture, the “sacred” is no longer confined to religious iconography, but resides in the commodified image of the female body: smooth-skinned, cellulite-free, surgically sculpted, endlessly perfected by Photoshop’s digital touch. These bodies function as cultural icons, the vehicles through which desire is manufactured and life is sold.

This series emerges as a critique of that economy of images. Working in collaboration with Hollywood horror makeup artist Joanna Chelsea, I employ the aesthetics of the grotesque to deliberately defile the fictitious ideal of feminine beauty. The work situates itself within the feminist tradition of artists who have destabilized the male gaze and its commodification of the female body—from Hannah Wilke’s subversive performances of sexuality, to Cindy Sherman’s parodic self-transformations, to Orlan’s surgical interventions into her own flesh. Like them, Desecrate resists passivity; it confronts the audience with bodies that are simultaneously alluring and repellent, eroticized yet disrupted.

The series stages its critique through visual contradiction. The images initially lure the viewer into what appears to be a pornographic setting—a space coded by patriarchal fantasy and culturally sanctioned taboo. Yet upon closer inspection, the surfaces betray themselves: horror prosthetics rupture the promise of flawless skin, disfigurations mock the smooth lines of the airbrushed silhouette, and the spectacle of desire collapses into unease. In this disjunction, the work interrogates the cultural machinery of pornography and advertising alike, exposing how both rely upon the same disciplining of women’s bodies into consumable ideals.

By “desecrating” the sacred icons of beauty, the series forces a confrontation with the ways women’s bodies have been canonized as commodities—objects of veneration only insofar as they conform to an impossible standard. Instead, these images reclaim the right to imperfection, distortion, and refusal, opening a space where the female body is no longer an emblem of cultural sanctity but a site of critique, resistance, and reimagining.