""Hujar's show reactivated something in me when I was feeling quite dissociated from current-day image making," Wilson tells AnOther. "His photographs felt heavy with their presence, both weighty with the sitter's lives - some coming to their end - as well as their humour and irreverence, as if the photographs themselves would weigh a ton to hold. The sitter's imperfections weren't erased but integral to the work itself. It made me know them.""
"Inspired, Wilson felt a conviction to "make photography feel precious again; to restore its tactility and presence when everything around us has been made inert by digitalisation and AI". The concept was deceptively simple. Having shot with Mugler, Maison Margiela, Gucci, Versace, Simone Rocha and many more, her desire for this project was to strip portraiture of its trappings and return to its most honest and raw form, photographing her sitters without the usual studio lighting, styling and retouching."
Screens and glossy digital images saturate daily life and foster desensitisation, diminishing the emotional currency of photographs. Physical prints can arrest attention through weighty presence and tangible tactility, revealing sitters' lives and imperfections as integral. Peter Hujar's retrospective at Raven Row exemplified that presence and inspired a photographer to produce a debut photobook, Gilded Lilies, aimed at restoring photography's preciousness. The project intentionally removed studio lighting, styling and retouching to capture honest, raw portraits. The work seeks to counter the inerting effects of digitalisation and AI by prioritising materiality, vulnerability and direct human presence.
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