I remember well the first day I saw Zachary Balber's body of work, which he later titled "Intimate Stranger." 

An introductory conversation about the series wasn't enough for me to run my sensitivity through the one hundred fifty-two photos he showed me. However, I immediately realized I was in front of a defiant, brilliant, and multi-discursive proposal.

Deconstructing the artist's strategies for taking his pictures can help us understand the principal motivations, feelings, and concepts behind "Intimate Stranger." Zack Balber has combined photography and performance art practices in every one of them—the latter, in a private and solitary display conceived to be recorded by the camera.

Balber transformed the spaces of luxury houses and apartments, where he fulfilled his routine job as a real estate photographer, into the ideal photographic stages to multiply his auto-representations. 

The first problem the viewer of his photos confronts is whether the artist is an accomplished, multifaceted actor able to be the main character of many stories of others or if he is always the theme of his images, exploring his thoughts, fantasies—even his demons—and life experiences. But well seen, the series provides enough hints for achieving the best answer to this inquiry. 

Balber always invites us to recognize ourselves in his actions by portraying himself as the staged personification of his dreams, unsatisfied desires, deep feelings, and perceptions of the current world.

His photographs imply filial issues, economic and political concerns, gender problematics—particularly about masculinity—a questioning vision of contemporary art, and so on.

"Intimate Stranger" is a prolific, highly imaginative, and visually inventive series; because of that, it is the container of several discourses.

José Antonio Navarrete
Curator