ESSAY | Portfolio Text | 7 July 2026
Everybody by David Star
Everybody (Sydney) (17–Rachel), 2002 (Detail)
Photography begins with a choice.
Where to stand. When to release the shutter. What to include. What to leave outside the frame. Every photograph is an act of selection, and every act of selection quietly establishes a hierarchy. This person rather than that one. This moment rather than another.
David Star's Everybody begins elsewhere.
Produced in Sydney in 2001, the project invited members of the public to be photographed under identical conditions. Each participant stood before the same background, illuminated by the same light, framed in the same way. Beneath every portrait appears a first name. Nothing more. The photographs are then assembled into a single, expansive field of faces.
At first, the work appears almost administrative. The repetition of pose, framing and typography recalls the visual language of archives, catalogues and official records. Yet the effect is unexpectedly humane. The system does not flatten individuality; it allows individuality to emerge without demanding that it perform. The project proposes a simple inversion of photographic authorship.
Most portraiture begins by deciding who should be photographed. Everybody begins by asking who wishes to participate. The distinction is small but profound. The work replaces selection with invitation.
This is not to suggest that the photographer disappears. The camera position, the lighting, the scale, the typography, and the very structure of the work remain carefully authored. What shifts is the location of that authorship. Rather than expressing itself through a preference for one subject over another, it resides in the design of the invitation itself. The creative act becomes the construction of a situation in which every participant is received under the same conditions.
The title carries this idea with remarkable economy.
Everybody (Sydney), 2002 (Detail)
Everybody is not a claim that everybody has been photographed. It is an invitation that anybody may be.
This openness gives the work its unusual emotional character.
Contemporary art has become exceptionally skilled at exposing systems of exclusion. Everybody does something quieter. It asks what kind of system might emerge if exclusion were no longer its organising principle. Participation becomes the only requirement. Difference remains visible, but it is no longer a condition for belonging.
The invitation extends beyond the decision to participate. It extends to the making of the photograph itself. Participants receive no direction once they enter the studio. Standing before a reflective pane of glass, they see only themselves. There is no photographer behind the camera to encourage, correct or approve. Within a carefully defined set of conditions, each participant decides how to occupy the frame before the automatic shutter is released.
This redistribution of authorship is one of the project's quietest but most radical gestures. Portrait photography has traditionally assumed that expression emerges through the photographer's eye—that the decisive act belongs to the person looking through the lens. Everybody proposes something different. The artist designs the system, but each participant becomes the author of their own appearance. The photograph records not an interpretation imposed from outside, but a decision made from within.
Joseph Beuys famously declared that "Everybody is an artist." The phrase is often understood metaphorically, as a defence of universal creativity. Everybody tests the proposition in a practical way. Rather than asking participants to admire art, it asks them to make aesthetic decisions: how to stand, where to look, whether to smile, conceal, perform or remain still. No judgement is offered, no correction made. The resulting portraits suggest that people are remarkably capable of composing themselves.
Everybody (Sydney), 2002 (Detail)
Diversity emerges not because it has been directed, but because it has been trusted.
Everybody is a constructed experiment in trust. The work asks what happens when authorship is redistributed rather than surrendered: when the artist designs the conditions of the encounter but trusts participants to determine their own appearance. Nothing is edited or corrected. There are no rehearsals, no retakes, no preferred outcomes. The system does not attempt to improve people; it trusts that whatever they choose to reveal will be richer than anything that could have been directed.
Seen from the perspective of the twenty-first century, the project has acquired an unexpected resonance. It predates the culture of selfies and social media by several years, yet it is almost its inverse. Participants exercise complete control over their own representation, but they do so without preview, repetition or editing. There are no filters, no audience to perform for, and no opportunity to revise the result. The freedom offered by the work is therefore accompanied by responsibility. It asks a simple but surprisingly difficult question: If you had only one photograph, how would you choose to be seen?
Seen today, more than two decades after its production, the photographs have acquired another dimension that no artist can manufacture directly.
Time.
Photography possesses a peculiar relationship with history. It does not merely preserve appearances; it slowly accumulates meaning. Hairstyles, clothing, expressions, posture, even the graphic design surrounding the images, have become records of a particular moment. What was once contemporary has become historical without changing at all.
John Berger argued that photographs should be understood within a "radial system", one in which they may be seen simultaneously as personal, political, everyday and historic. Everybody demonstrates this principle with unusual clarity. Each portrait remains irreducibly individual, yet together they become something no single photograph could achieve: a portrait not of people, but of a society imagining itself.
The work extends beyond the photographs themselves. Its true medium may be the invitation.
Everybody (Sydney), 2002 Video Stills
Before there are portraits, there is a poster, a conversation, a decision to come. There is a queue of strangers. There is waiting. There is curiosity. There is the brief recognition that one is contributing to something whose final form cannot yet be seen.
The finished photographs preserve only the visible trace of that encounter. The artwork also survives in the memory of participation.This perhaps explains why the project continues to feel remarkably fresh. It belongs to a lineage of conceptual art, yet it lacks the coolness often associated with conceptual systems. Its governing idea is rigorous, but its temperament is generous. The work trusts that if a place is made for people, they will fill it with more variety than the artist could ever invent.
Future iterations—Everybody (Tokyo), Everybody (Cairo), Everybody (São Paulo)—would not simply repeat the project. They would repeat the invitation. Each city would answer the same proposition differently, not because the system changes, but because people do.
There is a tendency to think that photography records what already exists. Susan Sontag observed that the photographer does not simply record the past but invents it. Everybody accepts that proposition while gently redirecting it. The invention here is not the individual image. It is the social form that makes the image possible.
In the end, the achievement of Everybody is neither documentary nor sociological. It is architectural. It constructs a temporary public space in which strangers become participants and participants become, however briefly, a community. The photographs remain.
But they are evidence of something larger than themselves: a work of art that begins not with the authority to choose, but with the generosity to invite.
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