One is known as the “man of a thousand faces,” the other was an obsessive recluse who died in obscurity. The strange and beguiling worlds of Tomasz Machciński and Tom Wilkins collide at Independent this year in a dual presentation by christian berst art brut, Paris, and Ricco/Maresca, New York. The two figures occupy an unusual place in the history of photography, both outsiders who brought a raw, deeply personal intensity to the genre of portraiture, yielding staggering bodies of work and often disturbing results.

Machciński was a photographer by intent. Born in the Polish village of Górki in 1942, his early life was marred by tragedy. Orphaned from infancy, he grew up in children’s homes and hospitals, where he was treated for bone tuberculosis and learned how to walk again. The young Machciński became profoundly attached to the American actress Joan Tompkins, who wrote him encouraging letters as part of a remote adoption program for war orphans. The realization, years later, that Tompkins was not his mother provoked a crisis of identity that became the centrifugal force in his artistic practice.

By the time Machciński passed away aged 79 in 2022, he had created more than 22,000 self-portraits, both still and moving image, in black and white and later color. Working before Cindy Sherman—who bears an obvious comparison to Machciński—he cast himself in a dazzling cornucopia of roles. Through these images he personifies a flamboyant woman wearing a electric blue dress, red lipstick, and a lampshade hat; a solider caught mid-shave, his face covered in foam; a supplicating nun; an austere priest; a topless macho guitarist; and a spray-tanned bodybuilder. Highly stylized, made up, and costumed, Machciński’s immense, endlessly inventive range of characters flits seamlessly between social classes, genders, sexualities, and creeds—and at times extends to other ethnicities.

Yet it is not known why Wilkins photographed these celluloid stars acting in different films and TV shows—Linda Gray as Sue Ellen Ewing in Dallas, Farrah Fawcett as Jill Munroe in Charlie’s Angels, Joyce DeWitt as Janet Wood in Three’s Company. Blurred and distant, the polaroids are portraits of portraits, images of actors playing roles as filtered through a screen, evoking a certain kind of longing and dislocation. Wilkins tends to capture the moments the women appear in states of undress, and his handwritten captions reference their underwear and breasts, adding an undeniable tone of eroticism.

A single self-portrait was found among the collection, in which Wilkins appears in an unbuttoned shirt and bra, his face hidden by the camera. Did he want to emulate the women who obsessed him? Does this single image turn his voyeurism into a study for his own transformation? These questions will never be answered, since Wilkins never spoke of why he made the photographs. He died in 2007 in Boston, and he seems to have lived in isolation, with no known friends or family. It is entirely up to the viewer to interpret the real motivation behind Wilkins’s image-making.

Still, there are intriguing parallels between these two artists. They shared a fascination with western constructs of identity disseminated through the prevalent media of their era, television and cinema, and particularly with the female icons of the screen. Berst and Bustamante point to Wilkins’s “manic and methodical” catalog of the women on his TV as a document of the “construction of the feminine genre and social role, as much as it reveals the extreme degree of passion one can put into the building of its own identity.” With a theatrical sense of identity play, Machciński’s self-portraits similarly convey a deep-rooted sense of seeking. His reconstructions tirelessly take down every kind of modern stereotype, often wearing maniacal expressions and forced, superficial smiles that leave an uneasy imprint on the viewer’s mind.