The Space Between Gazes

In September 2025, I was in Arusha, Tanzania, volunteering with a charity to help vaccinate dogs against rabies. I’ve done several of these projects — in India, Ghana, and elsewhere — but I’m always drawn back to Tanzania. The streets in the villages are filled with color and texture, and the people – the children in particular – are endlessly photogenic.

Although I consider myself a street photographer, in Africa I find myself making more portraits than I do elsewhere. A few are posed, but most are candid and unstaged, squarely within the spirit of street photography.

One morning, while riding in the passenger seat of our van en route to a vaccination site, I spotted a child standing by a weathered building about thirty feet away. The roads in Arusha are dusty and unpaved; by midmorning, every surface (and that includes humans)  is coated in fine red powder. The boy, wearing a bright orange shirt, was leaning against a wooden post, lost in thought, his dust-covered face half in shadow. Even from a distance, something about the light on his face and the way he was leaning against the post made me take notice.

Confined to the van, I couldn’t work the scene as I normally would. Instead, I raised my iPhone 16 Pro and took a few quick shots.

At one point, he lifted his head and noticed me, and for a brief instant, our eyes met. I took one last frame before he turned away.

Later, reviewing the images, two photographs stood out. The compositions were nearly identical — the same pose, the same light — but the emotional tone could not have been more different. In one, the boy looks downward, introspective and distant.

In the other, he’s staring straight at the camera, his gaze unguarded and direct.

That difference — the simple act of meeting the viewer’s eyes versus avoiding them — transforms the entire emotional landscape of these portraits.

When the eyes meet the lens, the photograph becomes personal. The viewer is pulled into an unspoken exchange. Sometimes it feels benign, other times it carries an edge. In this case, his direct stare felt almost confrontational to me. Not aggressive, but disarming. It stirred up an uncomfortable mix of guilt and shame: guilt for having been born into circumstances that shielded me from the kinds of challenges suggested by his expression, and shame at the possibility that I was turning someone else’s hardships into subject matter for my personal benefit.

When the gaze turns away, the dynamic shifts entirely. The viewer becomes an observer instead of a participant. The image turns inward, creating space for contemplation. In the downward-looking frame, I saw sorrow and vulnerability, not in him necessarily, but in my own response to the way he held himself. Averted eyes leave room for the imagination to wander, and in this photo, that wandering led to projections of pity and tenderness.

In essence, the direction of the gaze defines the relationship between the subject and the viewer. A direct stare demands engagement; an averted one invites reflection. Both can be powerful and each carries its own emotional weight. Seeing these two frames next to each other made that difference impossible to ignore.

I’ve looked at these two portraits countless times, and I still can’t decide which one moves me more. The boy’s expression in each, the light, the dust - together they capture something raw and human. Ultimately, it’s not the direction of the gaze alone that matters, but the tangle of assumptions, emotions, and projections that travel through the lens in both directions.