Adam Inglis

I’m an Australian-born visual artist based in New York City. I work mainly through street and documentary photography, using the camera to enter public life rather than watch it from a distance.

I usually photograph at close range. I’m drawn to moments when people, gestures, signs and surroundings come together in ways that are funny, uneasy or difficult to explain. Looking often goes both ways: people notice me, I notice them, and the picture grows out of that brief exchange.

My photographs begin with real encounters, but I don’t see them as neutral records. Public life is already shaped by advertising, architecture, surveillance, memory, law and social expectation before I raise the camera. I’m interested in how people present themselves within those pressures, how others read them, and how quickly a photograph can turn someone into a familiar type.

My archive has also become a form of indirect autobiography. The people I photograph aren’t stand-ins for me, but the gestures, symbols, tensions and humor I return to reveal patterns in my own attention. Editing often brings those patterns into view years after the photographs were made.

My practice draws on media studies, post-structuralist philosophy and psychoanalytic thought. I use those ideas to sharpen how I look, then test them against the unpredictability of the street.