Making It? 2019

Los Angeles is “the city of dreams”, “stars”, and “angels”. Everyone seems to be there to “make it” and live out their own version of a Hollywood fantasy. The small minority who actually make it will have their face remembered forever; through photographs in tabloids, social media, television, magazines, and movie screens. But the tragedy of living in a city of over 4 million ambitious people is that so many faces will go forgotten.

My series, ‘Making It?’ 2019, attempts to explore the struggle of fighting to be remembered while still being an anonymous face on the street. The 8 photos in the series, are photographs taken of strangers as they walk by me on various footpaths across LA and then digitally altered to hide their identity - highlighting the bleakness of being anonymous in a world where it pays to be known.

Inspired by the contemporary notion of fame through followers and likes, each portrait is cropped into a square to mimic the layout of Instagram photos while each of the faces are heavily manipulated through the Photoshop liquify tool as an ironic exaggerated statement on the extent of the use of popular applications such as Facetune that are used to completely alter a person's image for social media.

Ultimately the bleakness of living in LA is masked by its online and media representation of being glitzy, glamorous, and colourful when more often than not living in LA is not all it’s portrayed as being.