How many faces can one possibly have? Countless would probably argue American photographer Arlene Gottfried, a chronicler of anonymous lives and a passionate reporter of the unremarkable and daily. With a keen eye for telling details and uncanny situations, Gottfried has been restless in capturing the likes of her friends and acquaintances, as well as passers-by casually met on the streets of New York and elsewhere.

Ismael Burgos was such a friend with whom she laughed and cried, and whom she photographed for almost twenty years. They had been introduced back in 1984 when, as a dancer at a club on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Burgos had chosen the suggestive stage name of Midnight and performed to the rhythm of drums and poetry. A former hustler and a long-time petty crook, Midnight also happened to be an especially sensitive young man who suffered from schizophrenia. In Gottfried’s eponymous series, we meet him over the years and through the drastic changes in life. Midnight as a handsome young man poses nonchalantly in a dimly lit room. He is half-naked and self-absorbed. Another snapshot presents us with Midnight, this time short-haired and bellied. He is in the party mood and emphatically gesticulates before the camera. Later on, he looks straight into Gottfried’s mechanical eye, but this time he seems dishevelled and anguished. It is yet another Midnight whom we meet: a delusional one, haunted by voices, and who takes himself for Jesus Christ.

There is something utterly unsettling about these photographs. Yet this has little to do with the fact that they depict a marginalized and mentally ill individual, or that it is hard to believe that they are all portraits of a single individual. What keeps one looking is what the photographs cannot actually show and what one has to imagine. Gottfried knows that the illusion of reality in photography is what hinders its ability to reveal the world and not the other way around. Appearances are fundamentally mute; it is the eye of the beholder who lends them a voice. Each and every one of Gottfried’s snapshots of Midnight is elusive rather than graphic. It conceals as much as it reveals. By looking at her Midnight series in its entirety, one can grasp the scope of her friend’s changes in luck and mental health and one can also see the ruthless work of time on his ageing face. But what one cannot grasp is what he really was. In order to get a sense of it, one needs to cease looking and to start feeling. Gottfried’s photographs do not constitute proof or evidential documents. They are everything but the product of a cold witnessing eye. They bring one closer to Midnight, to his struggle and fundamental humanity through the eye of the heart. When looking at one of Gottfried’s portraits, one does not become a voyeur or a detective. One becomes part of his life, just as Gottfried did for years in spite of Midnight’s precarious situation. One feels the impossibility of judging by the appearances.