‘To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.’ ― Susan Sontag, On photography 

Carlos Tobón began his steps in commercial photography in the late eighties, after his studies in Graphic Arts and Photography in New Orleans and a specialization in portraiture and photographic lighting at the ICP (International Center of Photography) in New York City.  

Tobón's 'Portraits' series is part of a much larger photographic project that began approximately thirty years ago. The selection represents only a part of an open, extensive and continuous project through which artists, friends, writers, and ordinary citizens have passed, and who, from different fields, have left their mark on the social, intellectual, and cultural construction of the country.  

For Carlos Tobón, a special relationship of mutual respect is established between the photographer and the subject. It is a consensual dialogue in which a shared participation, a communion, is necessarily established. It is an act that requires a specific space and time, a one-on-one encounter in which a dialogue can be established between the photographer's gaze and the gaze of the subject. 

However, in this game of glances, the portrayed is in a position of vulnerability, where their minimal gestures and expressions lead to unveil the essence of their being, their state of soul. Exposure to the gaze and scrutiny of the other is not only a register, it is admitting the fragility of oneself and opening to the possibility of being seen as the self's image is never revealed to the individual; an image that subverts one's own and is constructed as an object that can be symbolically appropriated.     

This idea of vulnerability, of what is revealed and hidden, is reinforced in the photographic image when the photographer decides, in most cases, to remove the portrayed from their context and place them in a neutral space where there is almost no other element that distracts the gaze from the face of the person in front of the lens. The gaze, the expressions, the gestures, the light, the framing and the sobriety compose the elements that allow the viewer to establish a close and intimate dialogue with the subject.   

Tobón has worked in recent years in photographic series where he explores the aesthetic possibilities of objects, such as his father's carpentry tools, the landscape, or decomposing nature.  In these series, as well as in 'Portraits', the photographic act is verified as one that involves sensitivity and affection.