Arthur Omar works in all visual fields including photography and cinema. The human face has always been a central concern for the visual arts. It may have disappeared somewhat from painting, but photography has been quick to restore its importance. Arthur Omar concentrates totally on the face, scanning its surface for his subjects' emotions, for signs of life and death in their eyes, for the ridiculous and the painful. What photography offers – the truth of the instant and a near-infinite number of models – has allowed Arthur Omar to work towards an "anthropological" approach to the face. The painted portrait was a "bourgeois" affair; these photographs succeed in going deep into the hidden privacy of each individual, but in each case bringing forth its involuntarily yielded secret as a way of seeing I would term "democratic". These faces shine with the universal gaze of that enormous "people" to which we all belong, with all its immense suffering.