Even with the restraints of posture removed, there is uneasiness in the work of Johnnie Eisen. There is an apprehension associated with watching people who also know they are being watched, not by an audience per se, but by a video camera. In this respect, the work circumvents the voyeur and embraces a sensation of being watched, an affect of surveillance. This form of surveillance, however, does not originate in the discursive formation of the police or the property owner. Rather it tends to return to the viewer as a gaze. For Sartre, the look or the gaze is what constitutes our ability as subjects to recognize that the Other is also a subject. When we see each other, our mutual subjectivity is recognized in a reciprocal manner. Subjective exchange is premised on the act of seeing and being seen. When the moving portraits were originally made, the subjects faced a camera that implied an unseen but anticipated audience. While viewing these portraits, it is conceivable that we may also become self-conscious of our embodied gestures and movement, as if something was observing us at the same time. We too  are becoming portraits.


“Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing”, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it…” 13

The people in Eisen’s video portraits cannot see me, nor can I see them. This moment of recognition, that an object outside of the subject’s vision constitutes a gaze, is what Jacques Lacan referred to as the gaze of the Other, the object of the scopic drive. “When the subject looks at an object, the object is always already gazing back at the subject, but from a point at which the subject cannot see it.” 14 In short, the gaze is separated from the field of vision and is an object of the subject’s desire.

“What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which – if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragment form – I am photo-graphed”. 15

Reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests”, “Sittings” also tests the duration of the subject’s willingness to be in front of the camera for a specified period of time. Warhol completed approximately 500 screen tests where the subject was asked to sit motionless in front of a 16mm camera for the time required to expose a one hundred foot cartridge of film. Shot at 24 frames per second, the screen tests were projected at 16 frames per second, extending the duration of the projection to about four minutes and thirty seconds. Although titled “Screen Tests”, the work did not offer any future opportunity for a film performance. By emphasizing the redundancy of film careers and auditions, the “Screen Tests” functioned as portraits and metaphors for testing in general.