Looking Good is a compendium of Charles Traub’s photographs on the nature of wandering and the gaze itself, a central preoccupation of his art.
It brings together images from the mid-1970s to the present. As George Sand wrote, “the secret of the study of life lies in learning to use one’s eyes,” and Traub has pursued this study through more than fifty years of photography. People watch each other, watch Traub, stare into the void, wander in search of something to catch their attention. These are mostly candid photographs that capture the nuance of the fact that we are always in the act of observing.
What you discover, looking the way Traub does, is that in some sense we are all performers, aware or unaware, putting on different faces in the moment we are seen and see others. “The content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash, it is enormously momentary.” (Willem de Kooning)
