Everyone Is a Photographer

Everyone Is a Photographer was photographed at popular tourist sites, commercial spaces, and urban landmarks across different Chinese cities. In front of recognisable buildings, spectacles, and public attractions, people raise their phones to take selfies, pose for group photographs, or repeatedly adjust the frame. Photography has become an ordinary gesture within travel and everyday life, as well as a way of confirming one’s connection to a particular place.

I photographed these acts of image-making over time and combined the figures into elongated compositions. Across the images, gestures recur: phones are raised, screens are examined, angles are tested, and companions wait for the shutter to be released. Each person actively constructs an image of their own while simultaneously entering the image of another photographer. The landmark gradually recedes into the background, and the crowd looking at it becomes the central subject.

Smartphones have made photographic production part of everyday experience. Through photographs, people document their presence, shape their public image, and circulate personal experiences on social media. At the same time, similar viewpoints, gestures, and compositions are repeatedly reproduced, turning individual records into a shared visual pattern.

While making the work, I occupy a position similar to that of the people I photograph. They look at the city through their cameras, while I observe the way they look. The series examines the overlapping gazes that structure contemporary public space, asking how we see, how we become visible, and how personal experience is transformed into an image made for circulation.