Anonymous, 2020
Mixed media

The Anonymous series developed from the That People series. The portraits in this work are taken from Google Earth’s Street View and captured through screenshots. Compared with the representation of the human subject that was closely tied to portrait photography at the birth of the medium, the condition of human presence has undergone a transformation here: these figures are not intentionally gazed at, arranged, or captured by a photographer, but are instead preserved through a purely mechanical, almost unconscious form of recording.
 

These faces are automatically blurred by Google’s intelligent detection system, developed in response to privacy regulations. Yet this seemingly lost identity does not mean that the person is untraceable. By scanning the QR Code placed above the work—a gesture that requires viewers to raise their arms above their heads, almost like a ritualistic posture—they are able to return to the site where the artist first encountered these figures. The figures appear frozen within a specific fragment of time and space, while the artist’s acts of looking, capturing, and photographing are also precisely recorded and located within a single URL.
 

On the one hand, the work explores the possibility of screenshots as a form of photography. On the other, it enlarges figures who originally appeared as distant, incidental presences within satellite positioning and street-view systems to the scale of close-up portraits. These obscured faces oscillate between anonymity and traceability, evoking the moment in which human identity becomes blurred and uncertain, and opening up reflections on existence, being seen, and the politics of identity under data networks.
 

By framing these technological illuminations in ornate vintage frames, the work sets the form of classical portraiture against the content of digital surveillance imagery, highlighting the contradictory condition of human beings within contemporary technological systems: at once erased and precisely located.