The National Portrait Gallery is Jared Soares’s favorite museum. It’s just a few Metro stops away from the photographer’s home in Northeast DC, and he says he’s visited dozens of times to admire the works from his favorite artists. But Soares’s next visit will be different.
The second floor of the gallery now features Soares’s award-winning photograph, Misidentified by Artificial Intelligence: Alonzo and Carronne (2023). After last week’s announcement that he won the second prize in the 2025 Outwin Boochever portrait competition, Soares says the accomplishment still hasn’t fully sunk in. “I feel all the joy and elation will show up a couple weeks from now.” When he sees the work in the museum, Soares says, “I’ll probably ugly cry.”
The portrait depicts Alonzo Sawyer, a Maryland resident who was falsely accused of a crime and arrested after being misidentified by facial recognition software. He said it’s a warning to the dangers of surveillance, while also a nod to love and intimacy of relationships.
“It’s an image about tenderness,” he said. “but also the danger of AI, facial technology, and algorithms. I hope people will start to consider that we need more oversight and thoughtful decision making with this technology.”
The photograph was originally a commission for a 2023 New Yorker story about Sawyer, who was misidentified by a Maryland Transit Administration algorithm while authorities searched for the assailant of a local bus driver. The algorithm created a composite that resembled Sawyer’s face, making the Maryland resident—who was in a different county at the time of the assault—a primary person of interest. When he went to traffic court for an unrelated minor infraction a few days later, US Marshals slammed him against a wall. He was jailed for nine days without bail. That year, a study showed that facial recognition technology can’t consistently tell Black people apart.
Soares focused the portrait on Sawyer’s face and the hands of his wife, Caronne, which cradle it. “When I first got the assignment,” he says, “my first thought was ‘how can I show the uniqueness of Alonzo’s face, and how can I put it in a way that it confronts the reader?’” He said he wanted to make people stop, and read the story. “You can’t look away. You’re confronted by Alonzo’s face, and hopefully it suggests what he went through.”
Soares shared his personal connection as a Black man adds layers to the photo. “It’s my worst nightmare,” Soares said. “It’s probably every person of color’s nightmare.” Soares invited Sawyer and his family to the public opening last weekend. “It was incredible to see them smiling again, and able to enjoy this together,” he said.
All three prize winners—Antonio Cruz, Kameron Neal, and Soares—hosted an artist talk at the museum last weekend and did a Q&A about their respective pieces in the “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today,” exhibition. The curators “did an incredible job being able to connect three works,” he says.
If you plan to visit, keep an eye out for Soares; he intends to be a frequent visitor at the exhibition: “I want to savor it.”
Jenae Barnes previously reported and fact-checked for Capital B Gary in Indiana, 5280 Magazine in Denver, Forbes in New York and ABC News in Washington, D.C. She is a 2024 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow. As a DC-area native, she received her Bachelor’s from George Mason University and Master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School.
