Searching for Women in Online Group Photographs

Searching for Women in Online Group Photographs began with an incidental moment at work. One day, a colleague received a photograph of an invited guest for an event. The image turned out to be a group portrait, and the sender had to point out which woman in the photograph was the guest. At that moment, I was struck by the image: the group consisted almost entirely of men, and the woman stood out precisely because she appeared so visibly isolated.

This led me to notice how, in many publicly circulated images of leadership groups, executive teams, and institutional events, women are not entirely absent but often appear only in very small numbers. I then searched online using simple keywords such as “leadership group photo,” collecting images from companies, organisations, international institutions, and public events. None of these photographs were taken by me; they were already circulating online as standardised representations of authority and professionalism.

In processing the images, I obscured the male figures and left only the women’s faces visible. Individuals who had originally been embedded within a collective structure were brought into sharper focus. The work is not about identifying particular women, but about using a simple visual intervention to make a familiar gender imbalance newly visible.

Searching for Women in Online Group Photographs examines structures of power within images, as well as the act of searching itself. When women must be located within a field dominated by male figures, that very act of identification already reveals a social condition. Using found online images as its material, the work reflects on gender imbalance in workplaces, institutions, and public representation, and on how visual experience can make such imbalance immediately perceptible.