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In 2024, Balcer had his first solo show, Forensics, at Hutchinson Modern and Contemporary, New York. In the catalog published for that show, Hobbs characterized Balcer’s work as embodying a “crime scene aesthetic.” Writing about Balcer’s experiences growing up in French-speaking Quebec, Hobbs pointed out that a dark sensibility preceded his work as a writer of more than 400 television and film scripts, and no doubt influenced it. But it seems to me that Balcer’s artistic sensibility went further than simply the crime scene. His aesthetic is melded to a sense of social justice, which is a constant in all his activities, from his collaboration with Xu to donating, with his wife, more than 400 Inuit prints to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is this invitation to investigate what we are looking at and what it suggests about the broader world that distinguishes his photographs from other street photographers, both his modernist forebears and contemporaries."
