Working in Downtown Miami, I was repeatedly confronted by requests—for money, cigarettes, or food. These daily encounters underscored how I was seen: not as an individual, but as a resource, a conduit for capital. My instinct was often to ignore, to turn away, to preserve distance. This project emerged as a way to disrupt that asymmetry, to recast the encounter within a framework of exchange rather than extraction.
Each request became an opportunity for negotiation. When asked for a dollar or a cigarette, I responded with my own request: a portrait. When questioned about what I would do with the image, I asked in turn, what will you do with the dollar? In this act, the dynamic of giving and taking was reframed into a reciprocal transaction. The portrait became currency, a counterweight to the symbolic economy in which homelessness is both hyper-visible in public space and invisible within cultural institutions.
Placed in an art-historical context, the series recalls documentary traditions from Jacob Riis to Diane Arbus, yet diverges from their one-directional gaze. It also resonates with practices of institutional critique—from Hans Haacke’s exposure of economic structures to Santiago Sierra’s confrontations with labor and exploitation—where the artwork is not only an image but a record of social and economic exchange. By insisting on barter, the project reveals the power dynamics embedded in both philanthropy and representation: the homeless body as spectacle, the artist as mediator, and the institution as beneficiary.
What results is not a humanitarian gesture but a critical proposition. The portraits stand as evidence of an uneasy economy, where value circulates unevenly, and where art itself risks reproducing the very hierarchies it seeks to expose. In reframing the transaction, the series asks: who profits from visibility, who controls representation, and how might exchange be reimagined when both sides must give something up?