Splashes

Since 2008, Gabriel Jones has played with the codes of voyeurism in his photographs — never interacting directly with his subjects, who are always unaware they’re being observed.

The images in his series Splashes are characteristic of this approach: here, the focus is always on the “backdrop”. Over the course of several evenings, the photographer invited friends to pretend to pose for him — which allowed him to “steal” the situations taking place behind them. The photographs, taken with early cellphone cameras, have, for the most part, been reframed, so as to show only the situations and compositions that originally interested the artist. This tight cropping resulted in highly pixelated images, which the artist sometimes retouched to further accentuate the strangeness of the scenes he “collects. ”