Relinquished Presence

A large-scale black-and-white portrait series capturing unposed, unguarded moments.

No names. No backstories. No context. First shown as a solo exhibition at The Maud Street Photo Gallery, Newstead.

An older man in a light collared shirt, his eyes turned slightly away from the camera.

A woman in glasses with shoulder-length hair, caught mid-word, looking past the camera.

Portraits of
the in-between

Unlike typical portraits that focus on beauty, control, or composure, this series asks you to sit with images that are a little uncomfortable. Faces caught between expressions, looking away, or settling into something quieter than a pose. These are the moments that usually get edited out.

The portraits were made in a minimal studio with constant lighting and no direction, drawing on Irving Penn's corner portraits and the way they stripped sitters of their usual social cues. I don't ask people to smile. I don't tell them where to look. I wait, and over time the rehearsed camera face falls away. What appears in its place is what the work is interested in.

Every line, blemish, and flicker of uncertainty is part of the message. The images push back against the curated self of an image saturated culture, and offer something harder to find in its place: a kind of visual intimacy that doesn't require knowing someone, only being willing to look.

A young woman with curled hair laughs with her eyes closed.

An older woman with short hair looks to one side, unsmiling.

A man with a shaved head and glasses looks down, his expression still.

No posing.
No second takes

Each sitter had one session, around 45 minutes, and no second takes. I'd run a single setup, no posing, no direction, and let the session unfold. If a moment passed me, it was gone. Across a session I'd make somewhere near 500 frames, but I never asked anyone to do something again.

Most of the time I just sat and talked while I got to know the person in front of me. Other times we sat in the silences that came when there was nothing left to say. The camera kept working through both. What mattered was that each frame was a record of where the sitter actually was, not where I'd told them to be.

The setup was deliberate, but the portraits aren't. The conditions were built to take away the props of performance, and what was left was up to the sitter. In a culture built around constant self-curation, I wanted to make space for people to be seen without the work of presenting themselves.