Will Vickers - Anonymism

anonymism

taking candid photos of people in the age of cctv, smartphones, the internet & AI is a very different thing to before. with the outreach of media today, and with the recycling of content across the internet, if you are out in public it is never theoretically impossible for your face to be seen far across the world. what's more, there has never been such a greater abundance of cameras. the ethics of capturing someone without their consent is one that is broken all the time. we are rarely allowed to be anonymised.

these photos attempt to find a respectable balance in this question, avoiding identifiable features whilst still capturing people in their essence.

With these photos, I also draw upon themes explored by 19th-century impressionist painters:

focusing on spontaneity and capturing life "as-is"; turning more everyday views into picturesque visions; exploring the content of the changing modern world, as well as that of nature; relaxing the boundary between the background and the subject - and in doing so, often removing the identifiable details of the subjects. look at the paintings of camille pissarro or claude monet, for example, and I think you will see some similarities.

these painters and their contemporaries were, in part, in conversation with the influence of photography on painting. i'd argue that these painters helped shape the themes of much of photography ever since. part of what I am trying to do with this photo-series is bridge that conversation from the 19th century to the questions of privacy around photography today.

as well, without sounding too grandiose, I want to depict the contemporary world in a similar fashion to impressionists. in the photos below i have purposefully placed similar scenes from different parts of the world alongside each other. i want to explore how we look as a collective against the backdrop of the world we live in.

a lot of the time, when you're not trying, people look really cool. this series is my evidence for that.

photos from 2016 - 2025

photo featured in f-stop magazine Issue #119: https://www.fstopmagazine.com/groupexhibition.html#gallery-291

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