All of the portraits in Facing the Eastside are anonymous: they share a common plain backdrop and none of the subjects are identified in any way. This was the agreement Grabowski made with his sitters, who were willing to lend their appearances to the project but not their identities; and it was this arrangement that allowed Grabowski to present his subjects in a visual environment that belongs more to the history of photography than it does to the history of the neighbourhood.

These portraits are an attempt to give back something to the people we see in them, to offer them a straightforward likeness and not a sociological statement. At the same time these portraits remind us of how much we read into faces, how much physiognomy is part of the way we read the world.

What after all, is any photographic portrait but the trace element of a transaction made between two people of unequal power? Looked at this way, what shines through Mr. Grabowski's portraits isn't anything as simple and impossible as truth, but rather a kind of Hippocratic oath that, above all, the artist will do no harm. Captured against a gray backdrop is the promise sought by the more vulnerable people of the Downtown Eastside, as the rest of us decide what can and should be done to change the face of their community.