Baltimore native John Waters is celebrated for genre-defining films about outrageously memorable characters. He also creates photographic works that take others’ movies as their subject. However in John Jr., Waters photographs a pastel portrait made in 1950s Baltimore, a time and place explored in his own films. Upon inspection, the addition of a thin mustache is revealed, indicating that this is an image of the artist as a boy, and perhaps a reference to the earlier French artist Marcel Duchamp’s notorious gesture of adding a mustache to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Waters makes use of photography to collapse the present and past, allowing viewers to reflect on the evolution of his own famous persona and to recognize that the seeds of our adult nature are sown in childhood.