Visualising the rise of populism with post-truth pictures
- Text by Niall Flynn
- Photography by William Lakin
Back in 2015, London photographer William Lakin began work on a project exploring the influence and societal impact of hyper-consumerism.
While he was doing so, the European Union Referendum Law was unveiled during the Queen’s Speech following the Conservative general election victory in May of that year. A month later, across the Atlantic, a certain Donald Trump announced that he would be running for president.
As those campaigns – Vote Leave and Trump’s White House bid – began to take shape in tandem with one another, Lakin realised that the themes he’d been exploring within a consumerist context (artificiality, the obscuring of facts, narratives built to prey on discontent, general malevolence) were even more prevalent in a political one. So, he began to widen his gaze.
“I realised these feelings and disempowerment and disenchantment were broader than I’d initially thought. It was a bigger, more complicated picture,” he explains. “As Brexit started and Trump started to campaign, I realised that a lot of the things I was getting at, and a lot of the ways that consumerism connects and gains followers, were similar to how these campaigns were being orchestrated.”
The subsequent series, titled A Glimmer Of Accountability, operates as Lakin’s way of communicating these ideas. Using manipulation and selective cropping, the project visualises the rise and rise of a populist, post-truth landscape with a collection of uncanny images that blur the lines between real life and fiction.
In their confrontation of the past two years of politics, the photos range from the overt (an eerie crop of one of Trump’s infamous gesticulations), to the subtle (an uncanny cityscape, made to to appear almost red, white and blue). It’s never truly clear which images are genuine, and one which ones are products of Lakin’s distortion.
“I want it to be subtly noticeable whether the image has been manipulated or not, similar to how it’s kind of uncertain what you should believe and what you shouldn’t. I want that to be obvious, so the viewer questions what they’re really seeing,” Lakin notes.
“In [the images] the nuances and the details are hidden. It’s how power structures work – we’re fed some information, while much is kept back. It’s really only the bare bones that people are interested in. [With the campaigns] there was very little to actually back up what they were saying. It was more about giving a sense of a narrative that people could cling onto. The details are much less important.”
See more of William Lakin’s work on his official website.
Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Latest on Huck
Bobby Gillespie: “This country is poisoned by class”
Primal Scream’s legendary lead singer writes about the band’s latest album ‘Come Ahead’ and the themes of class, conflict and compassion that run throughout it.
Written by: Bobby Gillespie
Vibrant photos of New York’s Downtown performance scene
‘Balloons and Feathers’ is an eclectic collection of images documenting the scene for over two decades.
Written by: Miss Rosen
Picking through the rubble: Glimpses of hope in the US election results
Clambering through the wreckage of the Harris campaign, delving deeper into the election results and building on the networks that already exist, all hope is not gone writes Ben Smoke.
Written by: Ben Smoke
US Election night 2024 in Texas
Photographer Tom “TBow” Bowden travelled to Republican and Democratic watch parties around Houston, capturing their contrasting energies as results began to flow in.
Written by: Isaac Muk
In photos: “Real life is not black and white” – Polaroid x Magnum Open Call winners
See pictures from the competition organised by two titans of contemporary photography, which called upon artists to reject the digitalisation and over-perfectionism of our modern world, technology and image-making.
Written by: Huck
In photos: Rednecks with Paychecks
‘American Diesel’ is a new photo series that looks at the people, places and culture behind the stereotypes of rural America.
Written by: Ben Smoke