Daly’s photographic practice offers two different approaches that are presented under the collective title of ‘Citizen Reality’:

1. Taking photographs in real life (IRL), by ‘being there’, or
2. Appropriating and ‘Re-photographing’ third-party images sourced and selected vicariously, from moving imagery on television or computer screens.

Both methodologies are based in analog / film process, enabling clarity at scale in paper prints.

Regardless of the contrast between these visual syntaxes, there’s no hierarchy or boundary of subject matter. The picture outputs reflect a compulsive and intuitive response to a photographic addiction, confronted with an exponentially evolving and overwhelming quantity of material to sample.

Citizen Reality aims to aesthetically seduce and sometimes subvert the viewer’s perception. The aim is to explore and provoke reflection upon how imagery, art, media and Ai shape our understanding of reality, and [to] question the idea of an objective photographic authenticity. The work experiments with motive, evolving technology, provenance, title, and editing (both in the viewfinder and in post-production) to offer critique via narratives with varying degrees of truth. The outputs result from a mix of aimless serendipity and a calculated desire for memorability.

Influences include Avedon, Eggleston, Frank, Gruyaert, Friedlander, Prince, Hamilton, Bechtel, Sontag, Clay Shirky, Adam Curtis, Kissinger’s ‘constructive ambiguity,’ Vladislav Surkov, Lee Atwater (“perception is reality”), Thucydides (“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.”), McLuhan, Boorstin, Debord, Baudrillard, Neal Gabler, and of course, Trump.

All characters and events depicted in these images are entirely fictitious & any similarity to real places or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended. None of what you see here really happened.

© Chris Daly 2022