Robert Mack: To Observe and Present

Napalm Sky, Oil painting, 48 x 96 in.

By VICTOR SLEDGE October 7th, 2025

For military brats, hopscotching from home to home is customary. Home truly has to be where the heart is because the house itself is in constant flux. Multidisciplinary artist Robert Mack understood this concept by the time he landed in the fifth new home he was brought to as a child, then again in the tenth new home. So by the time it was all said and done and Mack had landed in 16 new homes over a 20-year period early on in life, he had reached a new level of what it meant to be in flux. 

“My father was a WWII pilot in Germany, and because he was in the military, we kept moving from location to location. Every three to six months, we were moving,” Mack says. 

The experience of moving homes even once can be disorienting, but when you do it as many times as Mack has, you have no choice but to bring some level of meaning to this endless experience of coming and going, familiarizing and losing. For Mack, the meaning he found as he worked ad nauseum to integrate himself into new spaces was in learning to blend in wherever he found himself.

“I had to become a chameleon. I had to fit in wherever I went. I would try to be open to individuals and situations I would be in while also trying to listen very carefully. That’s a key thing,” Mack remembers. 

Untitled 1981, Photograph Silver Gelatin, 16 x 20 in.

In one of his early photographic series, Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, Mack presents a masterclass in how to earnestly position yourself in a new and potentially rocky space and become a fly on the wall in the most artful way possible. 

“I was allowed to enter a hospital for the criminally insane and interact with the men without security guards. I had to very much listen to them and be careful of my reactions. So that gift of being able to fit in helped me with that project,” he says. 

It is a desperately needed irony: Someone enters a place where people are forgotten, where their stories are dramatized and dehumanized, and that person cleans off the lens until we see the people in this space in their full, unscathed humanity. 

Mack remembers the caution he had to hold in the facility as he navigated the grounds and the people living there with no security. Although Mack mostly avoided asking or hearing about what crimes existed amongst the group, he was aware that people there had potentially volatile tendencies based on their mental health struggles, so Mack’s mission was to balance caution with exploration. “I didn’t know what their crimes were. I didn’t want to know,” Mack says. 

From that intention, Mack was able to traverse the facility while making genuine connections with the people there. And those connections became the bridge that allowed him to not just learn about the patients he photographed but also create crystal clear work highlighting a group of people who the world works so hard to overlook. 

“I spent months and months getting to know them. I developed a relationship with the patients, so when I started taking photographs of them, there was a certain trust that came about,” he recounts.

Untitled 1981, Photograph Silver Gelatin, 16 x 20 in

In his work, Mack was not worried about judging his subjects for what they could have done in their past or their behavior in the facility, but rather, he chose to accept them as they stood in the present. The work was about letting the patients be. And to add to that honesty and candor in the portraits, Mack also chose to present the series in black and white. “Black and white is such a powerful medium, sometimes more dramatic than color,” he says. 

There’s something about stripping the color from the series that cuts through the noise of what you may have thought about the subject and forces you to sit with the bare person. The depth of their stare, the whim of their smile, the innocence of a candid moment—Mack’s work in Not Guilty strips his subjects down to the point where all the audience can focus on is their most transparent state. Not barred by the weight of their mental health or whatever crime they have committed, but simply highlighted for their existence in a world that has almost washed it away.

“I remember this one patient who absolutely refused to be photographed,” Mack writes in his book about the project. “He was extremely depressed, sat alone on a bench, smoking, his body curled away from anyone in the room. After many weeks of my visiting this particular ward, the man suddenly appeared in front of me and boldly announced,‘Okay, you can take my picture now.’ He went back to his spot on the bench and I took several images. When I tried to get him to smile he couldn’t shake that look of deep depression. The next day I gave him his ‘best looking’ photograph. He stared at it long and hard, then looked up at me and said ‘I thought it was this bad.’ I was crushed by his reaction and sensing my concern he explained, ‘You know the mirrors in the bathrooms, they’re covered with thick plexi-glass so that we won’t kill ourselves. Funny thing is, though, the plexi-glass... it ends up warping our reflection, distorting our image, like those fun-house mirrors at a carnival.’ I stared back uncomfortably, not knowing how to respond. Finally, he said, ‘I’ve been here at this hospital for over eighteen months and this is the first time I’ve clearly seen myself.’” 

It takes a wallflower, indeed, to capture that work in such clarity. And it takes vulnerability from Mack as a photographer to release himself into the process enough to capture those photos in such a masterful way.

Untitled #1A 2014, Photograph, archival exhibition paper, aluminum mount, UV mat protection, 42 x 28 in

And Mack fosters that vulnerability in the people he works with as well, which you can see from his more recent photographic series Wrapped Portraits. 

The portraits are nude in reality and in spirit, while being fluid and nuanced in their emotion. He strikes a balance between gentle vulnerability and the depth of tone photographing subjects in the minimalist setting of the Californian high desert. Where one photo may feel grief-stricken, another may feel transcendent. There’s a synergy between Mack and the people he works with in the series that speaks to the care and security he puts into his work.

The nudity in the portraits never feels explicit or gratuitous. Instead, it feels necessary and illustrative. It feels like an offering from subject to photographer more than it does a command from photographer to subject. 

“That intimacy is what I was after. I photographed them in the desert before sunrise. They’re still in the dream state. There’s no make up, no hair, no Vogue magazine set ups. It’s just myself and the individual,” he says.

Mack holds such a reverence for his subjects’ likeness and form that allows that intimacy between him and the subject, but also the subject and the camera, to sing. “That reality of the intimacy made them more vulnerable, and therefore, made the images more powerful,” he says. 

As an observer of the world and people around him, that intimacy also leads him to the more complex and gripping sides of our humanity as well.

Assault, 2022, Oil painting, 48 x 96 in

When you see Mack’s paintings, in some cases, you see contemplative pieces that make you question more about the person on canvas. In other cases, you see Mack sit us down in the middle of some of the most intimate cruxes of our failures as a society. 

In his painting, Assault, which is now maybe more relevant than ever, Mack paints a tattered, bullet-holed American flag opposite an AR-15, an assault rifle that has become synonymous with countless mass shootings in the US.  And for Mack, there is more to this painting than a simple statement on guns. “I called the painting Assault because guns are an assault on democracy and an assault on human life,” he says. 

You’ll find in Mack’s paintings that they often have a layered, poignant message that reads past the surface of the canvas. 

He tackles other man-made issues as well. From climate change to government leaders, Mack’s paintings prove that he isn’t just watching the world around him from a bird’s eye view. He’s using that same vantage point to scrutinize the world as well. 

Glacier, Oil painting, 48 x 96 in.

Being an artist tapped into vulnerability and intimacy means you cannot exclusively search for those moments that make us feel wonderfully seen or viewed in humanistic glory. It means that someone like Mack has to also fluff the pillows and tuck himself—and his audience—in with the hardest realities of our existence. And he isn’t there to step on a soapbox or drudge up some self-righteous commentary, but more so to bear witness to and present an issue. 

Mack comes to observe and present, not sensationalize or exploit, the parts of us we find when we simply watch. It’s what he has learned after years of tuning his eyes and ears to whatever spaces he enters, and it’s what grounds his work for the audience to enjoy.

“The best thing to do is to not judge. Just try to interact. If you can do that, it can be a first step toward more human interactions,” he says.  

To learn more about Mack, you can visit his website at robertmack.com.