The Big Society

• Prize
• Photographer
  Richard Ansett, United Kingdom
• Socials
• Website
  http://www.richardansett.com

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.

• Biography
  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.
• Awards
  His portrait of an autistic boy in a flower garden in the Donbas region of Ukraine from the series Boys in a City Park won the overall prize for photography at the Arte Laguna Prize 2013 and his project Mother and Child, Donbas, Ukraine 2011 exhibited at UNICEF “What is Your Name?”, Arsenal, Kiev 2016 as a metaphor for the trauma of enforced internal dislocation and migration due to conflict and exhibited in the British Parliament as part of the exhibition 1001 Critical Days. His portrait of Danel, 9 from series Children of Grenfell was selected as the People’s Choice at the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2018 and his images have been selected 13 times for the National Portrait Gallery, London portrait prize exhibition. ‘BIRTH – A Portrait of Grayson Perry’ was awarded first prize at the Sony World Photography Awards 2019 and the previously unpublished archive of his 10 year relationship with the artist ‘MUSE- A Portrait of Grayson Perry’ was published by ACC Art Books in 2023 to critical acclaim. Many of his portraits have been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery . The portrait of the film director David Lynch was acquired by the Smithsonian and his portrait of film director David Cronenberg and Professor Margaret MacMillan acquired by the National Canadian Library and Archives. The portrait of Dame Hilary Mantel was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 2023 on the event of her death and he was the only man whose work and testimony were included in ‘Reframing Narratives Women in Portraiture’.