New Media Artist
We The People...
(2019)
For this body of work, I explore the idea of a creating portrait of someone through the lens of their online presence. With that in mind, I wanted to capture this on two different scales, one consisting of a somewhat localized social media presence and one consisting of a larger national level.
Over the years sharing my art practice on social media has allowed me to develop a large number of surface level relationships with people (especially other photographers in my own city) whom I have never or only a handful of times met face to face. These limited face to face interactions and the highly curated nature of social media create a very limiting portrait of individuals, hence the models facing away from the camera and only getting a slight view of their faces.
This social media presence is also be connected to privacy issues and government surveillance. The United States has a population in the hundreds of millions, so many of us in the eyes of “the powers that be” are likely nothing more than another name in the system, or a stream of revenue. To visualize this dehumanization, I wanted the QR code to essentially act a branding. I feel that most people have some sort of awareness to this but for the most part, it stays at the back of their consciousness not often coming to the forefront of their mind. As a result, anxiety and paranoia associated with these topics linger in the back of their minds as well following them around in our day to day lives.