Most Wanted

Most Wanted is a series of black and white portraits by artist Sara Oscar that combines historical archive images with restaged photographs. The series draws on the familiar tropes of mugshot photography, but removes its subjects from their criminological context.

By appropriating the institutional criminal photograph normally associated as evidence in a court of law, the portraits play with the idea of photograph as ‘evidence’, or, document of ‘truth’. Without captions, the images point to the fluid dispersion of images in the post-truth, internet era: are these Tinder profile photographs, fashion headshots or records of the FBI’s most wanted?

Presented by Photo Australia for PHOTO 2021