It is not merely a photograph. The word capture is never been better used to describe this photographic action. The subject here is caught by the camera, instantly categorized in a dramatic way. The attitude, the look, and the setting immediately ascribe the image to the genre of criminal, carceral photography.

The distance between the photographed subject and the camera is immense, chilly.

The fascination that this type of photography brings to the viewer is somehow impudent. We are where we should not be, and we witness what we should not be seeing.  And we are so through the "objective" eye of the camera. 

The revelation of the precise instant where the passage from freedom-to captivity is lived.  The moment in which the person exits the known world to enter the "other" universe of the stigmatized.

DO WE OBSERVE OR ARE WE OBSERVED?

There is no promiscuity, no complacency between the photographed and the photographer, no surprise, no image stealing.

You think you are the one looking, but it is he who is observing you...  No one has ever stared at you as long and as squarely as he does. There is no complicity between the photographer and the subject,  you don't feel his inner world in the eyes. It is the same spiritual distance that you often experience when photographing the inhabitant of a remote, unknown place of an entirely different culture. There is no translation of the feeling. There is no interpretation, there is hardly any message.

A disconnected look, empty, without history. The look as a barrier to his invisible world and as a scrutiny of the other on our own personality. The look without sexual connotation, of race or social situation.  

We believe we are witnessing a drama, but the drama is not in what the image offers us. We want to believe that this glance, captured in a fraction of a second, can unfold something to us.

And the only revelation is that of our own fears.

Fact.- 1a: something that has actual existence, 2: a piece of information presented as having objective reality (Merriam Webster Dictionary)

Drama.- 3a: a state, situation, or series of events involving interesting or intense conflict of forces

Fiction.- Back to its Latin source late Middle English (in the sense ‘invented statement’): via Old French from Latin fictio(n-), from fingere ‘form, contrive’. (OED)

AS IT WAS. AS I REMEBER IT TO BE - HARRY FISCH.