Group Photos

About the work

Group Photos is a series made automatically on the gallery’s server. It began on 28 September 2026 with a new work every two hours. The rules were updated on 7 October 2026, and it now makes one work a day. For each work, ten photographs are drawn at random from those uploaded that day to a public platform where people share observations of plants, animals and fungi. Each is by a different photographer, and each carries a free licence. The ten are laid over one another and combined by sharpness: at every point of the image, the photograph most in focus there counts the most.

The work belongs to a long line of composite and layered photography, in which many images are condensed into one. Historically, the method has often been used to produce an average or a “type”. Averaging erases what is particular and leaves what is common. Group Photos does the opposite: by keeping what is sharp, it keeps what each photographer chose to look at, the bird, the insect or the leaf in focus, and lets the rest give way.

The series also draws on work with photographs made by others and shared online, and on the tradition of chance and instruction in art, where a rule is set in advance and chance decides the rest. Here the rule is fixed: ten photographs, ten photographers, uploaded the same day, combined by sharpness. What the rule is applied to is left to chance. Nothing is selected by hand. The image is a group photo of people who never met, uploaded on the same day, each looking at something else.

Each work lists its sources, their photographers and licences, and how much of the image each photograph makes up.

Press

Group Photos – Ten strangers, one image, every two hours, CreativeApplications.Net, 1 October 2026

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