The Fashionable Voyeur

Whether our glance is admiring, critical or merely curious, we have an irresistible urge to stare at each other.

"The Sartorialist" photo exhibition at the Adamson Gallery on 14th Street NW exploits that basic human instinct. Photographer Scott Schuman takes pictures of interesting-looking people on the street. His tone is celebratory. He is unconcerned with style catastrophes, only successes.

Schuman's subjects are not famous unless one happens to be a student of fashion personalities, and then one will recognize Hamish Bowles, an editor at American Vogue, whose portrait greets you at the entrance to the exhibition, or Carine Roitfeld, the editor in chief of French Vogue, who glares from a distant wall. (There almost seems to be something unfair about portraying these professional fashion characters as nameless eccentrics.) Yet the photos are treated as anonymous portraiture: "Untitled" (Paris, 2007), "Untitled" (New York, 2007) and so on.

Schuman has a background in the fashion industry, not in design but in marketing and sales. He spent a significant amount of time at the intersection of creativity and commerce, runway and reality. And it's that aesthetic nexus that he tries to capture in his photos. During fashion weeks in New York, Milan and Paris, Schuman is a familiar sight, politely asking passersby whether he can take their picture.

It is difficult not to be drawn to his graphic image of a woman dressed in black and white and standing in a Paris square. It has a vintage feel to it, as though its subject had been photographed in the 1960s rather than 2007. And there is a great deal of charm in the picture of a platinum blonde in a red dress. She's tilting back on her heels and wearing a mischievous smile.

And yet the exhibition can't match the indulgent pleasure of an afternoon spent people-watching.

Perhaps that is because people-watching is not a passive pursuit but rather an improvisational dance in which we gleefully make split-second judgments. As humanity parades past us, we engage in a running dialogue filled with dismay, admiration, curiosity and envy.

What goes through our mind when a lady wearing a fanny pack and poorly fitting terry-cloth tracksuit marches by? Do we look at her and feel superior? Perhaps we assume that she is a tourist and we grow smug thinking that we'd never traipse around on vacation looking like that.

What makes us smile when we see an elegant fellow with a pocket square and particularly well-cut suit? This man has brushed up against our lives, sharing just a bit of his glamour. It's akin to the thrill we have when we encounter a celebrity on the street. Fame has entered our orbit and we feel a frisson of excitement. We feel more connected to a celebrity who swishes past us in a few seconds on a crowded street than if we spend 30 minutes examining their every pore in a professional portrait.

The voyeuristic pleasure of people-watching is about catching others unaware. You're glimpsing them with their defenses down. You get to be both anthropologist and fashion cop. And no one is the wiser.

But Schuman isn't a stealth photographer, stealing glimpses of both the famous and the unknown as they walk by. His subjects willingly offer themselves for his consumption. They're showing us the face they would like the world to see, not the one they wear when they are distracted, hurried or simply bored by the day's tedium.

For this exhibition, the photos have been separated from the chatty commentary that accompanies images on Schuman's blog ( http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com), which is where he originally built a following. And although he is a global gadabout, it's hard to tell whether he's in Stockholm or Milan. Unless you're already familiar with those cities, the background is an unidentifiable blur. But can a person's appearance tell us much of anything without context? Doesn't it matter if the subject is in Georgetown or on Madison Avenue? Headed into a fashion show or a coffee shop?

Other street photographers are drawn to the well-dressed and the eccentrically attired. But their work is more akin to anthropology than pure people-watching. The photographer Bill Cunningham, whose work appears in the New York Times, is the fashion industry's best-known chronicler of street trends and social gatherings. His photos, grouped thematically, define particular eras, a certain stratum of the population or the way in which social mores have shifted over time.

New York magazine's weekly Look Book transforms a single image of an individual snapped on the street into a mini biography. Writer Amy Larocca asks the questions that nag at the amateur voyeur: Why do you leave the size sticker on your hat? What's going on with your eye makeup? How do you get your hair like that?

Schuman is a photographer fascinated by surface images. But the pleasures inherent in people-watching -- the nonverbal discourse and voyeuristic intrigue -- are missing. And style alone isn't enough to hold our gaze.