The Particular Gaze

"Samuel Shats (1952) undertakes a long three-year pilgrimage through a single place, a vacant place that he discovers by chance from a nearby parking lot, where, as happens everywhere to the point that no one sees anymore, there is marginal life adapted to his circumstance. Shats starts by incurring that dangerous prerogative of photography that is indiscretion, a state prior to accusation, just or unjust, which displaces privacy and, even more so, the intimacy of individuals to a secondary level. Such a risk demands the solidity of the motif and, of course, the solidity of the author who perpetrates that space which is foreign, even though belonging to no one, and in both cases, Shats easily transcends the warnings"