Review Santa Fe: Jesse Burke

Jesse Burke images from Platform Gallery

Jesse Burke's portraits are mostly of men. Men who normally would seem to be guarded, but Burke is able to make these men appear vulnerable. Vulnerability is often associated with the feminine gender, but wrongly so. Men are forced to give up the public display of this emotion as a child. Usually, the small boy left to his own without cultural influences will have to work through his sensitive phase allowing his parents, if they are so inclined, to coddle and console him. As males reach toward adulthood they often outgrow, or hid, this side. In Burke's earlier series Intertidal, he approaches the average beer-drinking, sport-loving man at a moment of defenselessness. Each is unguarded. Continuing on this them in his newest series, Low, Burke photographs men who are impoverished, homeless or overlooked or unaccepted in some way by society. Each man is exposed in glowing light. The body language that Burke captures in this subjects, including gaze and posture, says much about the photographer and the photographed.

Intertidal is also available as a book of from Decode Books.