Anonymous Portraits

The morality of candid photography has always sat uneasily with me. I believe in the documentary value of the candid, and its aesthetic unpredictability. But when people react adversely to my camera, it shakes my resolve. Is it really defensible to take somebody’s image and use it for your own purposes, without their awareness or permission? In this series, I searched my archive of the last two years for candid portraits with obscured faces. I’m looking for a middle ground: to preserve the anonymity of the subject and the immediacy of the candid. In the absence of faces, the focus of the portrait shifts to gesture, narrative, and juxtaposition between subject and place. In my street photography I'm not interested in how people look, but what they do. The subject’s face doesn’t matter, because I’m not interested in the individual so much as the act. Anonymous Portraits is an attempt to distil this approach to its clearest form.