The Big Society

The normal instincts at being seen naked have been lifted by the potential salvation of surgery*. These subjects are less connected emotionally to their old bodies; they are at this point partly living their new lives disassociated from the flesh around them. For an increasing amount of us, our emotional state is expressed through our relationship with food and it inevitably shows. These people have become walking allegories of our own failings and we seem to despise them for it but they exist as a part of ourselves, they are in this moment representing what we could be or are; they are physical representations of our own emotional possibility. *All the images in this series are taken days before gastric band or colon reduction surgery.

Richard Ansett is a fine art, social documentary portrait photographer with a distinctive and prolific personal and commercial practice spanning over 30 years. Richard is a passionate, vocal advocate of the medium as an art form, talking and writing candidly about the realities of a life in photography. Richard is increasingly focused on enabling a new generation and those from marginalised communities to develop a relationship to photography.