Sacrifice brings together portrait photography and oral histories into a body of work that highlights contemporary social issues.
Through the personal and often powerful stories, participants to the project contribute to an un-curated narrative that brings about universal notions of generosity, hardship, community, commitment, but also privilege and inequality.
Sacrifice brings together portrait photography and oral histories into a body of work that highlights contemporary social issues.
Through the personal and often powerful stories, participants to the project contribute to an un-curated narrative that brings about universal notions of generosity, hardship, community, commitment, and privilege and inequality.
Sacrifice is a portrait photography project that reflects the universal notations of sacrifice, be it big or small, life-affirming or limiting, tragic or slightly trivial. It explores universal notions of community, connectionless and personal struggle. It is an outlet for self-expression that is inclusive and non-judgmental, expressed through photography and oral histories.
The portraits and stories captured and shared in Sacrifice are told and received through diverse views and lead to conversations about our role and responsibility towards our community and society.
Sacrifice is a documentary portraiture project that visual artist William Debois has been working on since early 2020. The multi-year project involves photographing people on black and white film in front of a backdrop custom made for the project and collecting the sitters’ oral histories of sacrifice.
Drawing its development founding from the classic road-trip format, a format undertaken by many influential photographers, Gladstone based photographer William Debois has captured portraits of people met along the way, by chance or through recommendation. Debois has met, listened to, and captured their visual and oral representations of sacrifice. A significant portion of the artworks were created during Debois’ road trip from Melbourne, Victoria, to Gladstone, Queensland, covering 1,986.4kms from February to March 2021. In each town, and for each shoot, Debois set up a rugged-looking backdrop, fabricated from an old military tarpaulin, photographing his sitter using a classic Hasselblad film camera.
In this creative and personal process, the sitter is asked to share their reflections on the two questions:
What does sacrifice mean to you?
What sacrifice have you made?
Using the central theme of sacrifice, the project aims to illustrate the diversity of lifestyles, values and aspirations that define the Australian nation in 2021, reflecting the complexity of personal narratives.
The approach and methodology that William Debois’ employs are highly democratic. He does not target any demographic or social groups when inviting his subjects to be photographed and share their stories, with most portraits resulting from chance encounters. This approach draws participants from highly diverse areas, metropolitan cities, regional towns, and remote homesteads.
Through this capture of our current day and the people that occurs in our towns and cities, William Debois is bringing to light ways these images can connect people, places, and experiences across state and regional boundaries.
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