Gonzalo Bénard Photo Series, ‘B Shoot by A Stranger’ Is All Done Via Webcam

moray mair | Photography | July 12, 2012

Photographer Gonzalo Bénard has produced this wonderful series called ‘B Shoot by a Stranger’. His work is unlike anything I’ve seen for a long time. It is naked, raw, voyeuristic. The series focuses on capturing people in their vulnerable, intimate, private and lonely moments, their story told from the perspective of a stranger.

What Bénard did was find volunteers from all over the world and asked them to hook up their lap top and keep their webcam open. This allowed him to be present without physically being there. The volunteers forgot about him. He kept shooting. The result was this beautiful and haunting series.

Here’s what he had to say about the work:

As this project, “B Shot by a Stranger”, was undertaken without an imposed physical presence or even an energetic interference, it left much more space for you to keep feeling your own loneliness. The volunteers were not acting, they were going through it for real. They were alone and lonely. I was on this side, shooting (and sometimes listening to them) as a stranger, from the other side of the world, using an Internet satellite. They just had to leave the laptop and webcam open, “taking me” with them to their physical places: bedroom, living room, bath, kitchen, garden…So I could be there with them…not being. They could trust in this stranger as they knew they could just turn off if they didn’t feel safe. At certain points the Internet can be unreal, can belong to a dream’s box. You can enjoy the dream, you can release your subconscious mind and you can just wake up from it whenever you want. You can show who you are. Or not. You can be listened to by a world. You can be seen. You can exhibit yourself. You can share. With or without your own identity.

 I kept posting up photo after photo I just couldn’t decide what to leave out. Eventually I just had to randomly pick. You should go have a look at the rest.

Via Camera Obscura