In his series titled simply "Gamers (a work in progress)", photographer Todd Deutsch has produced a series of artfully-composed portraits documenting the slack jaw, slumped posture and terrible skin afflictions with which all gamers are intimately familiar.

Says the artist's statement:

Gaming is an overwhelmingly male subculture dominated by tech savvy brashness and role-playing games known as first-person shooters. Avid players take over empty storefronts and set up temporary computer networks for 2 days of nonstop video combat. The events are called LAN parties and resemble a cross between the rebellious bravado of a biker rally and the adolescent nerdiness of Boy Scout camp. Gamers often exist on contradictory fringes of mainstream culture. Their association with violent games brands them as time bombs dangerously close to becoming sociopaths, while their image as computer geeks and loners depicts them as sympathetic and endearing underdogs.

I ramble on after the jump.

The blue glow of wireframe spectacles in a darkened server farm. The vague smile accompanying a successful headshot. Energy drink cans and scattered junk food wrappers. A lone girl, seen distantly over the top of a Windows XP monitor array, as if being secretly subjected to the xenophobic Male Gaze of the viewer.*

I am reminded strongly of my middle school days, wherein I expended hours upon hours and the entirety of my allowance, glued to Tribes and Quake 2 in a seedy network gaming parlor downtown. Are these vistas depressing, funny, nostalgic, exciting? Were they taken at a single event, perhaps a convention, or over the course of days or weeks, gathering to gathering? How much of yourself do you see in these gaping boys? Eliza gauger

Entire Gallery Here [via Aeropause]

* I'm allowed to use this term because I went to art school for a year and a half!