Sander Dekker (1980) is an Amsterdam-based artist working with photography, installation, video and publications. His work examines how people present themselves, and those who do so entirely on their own terms.

In 2011 he started sending messages to strangers he found online, then boarded a plane and knocked on their doors. He photographed fast, with a hard flash and often without looking through the viewfinder, in sessions that rarely lasted more than an hour. Ten years and a dozen countries later, The Social Media Project had become a document of a moment that no longer quite exists, when reaching out to a stranger still felt easy and open. The people who answered were unapologetically themselves: no interest in being normalised, no need for validation.

Every project since has shifted the perspective. The Social Landscape turns from the individual to the stream: thousands of ten-by-fifteen-centimetre prints, side by side, as overwhelming and impossible to take in as the feed they mirror. In #fun, Dekker steps in front of the camera himself and does nothing: he stands still and expressionless while everyone around him performs for the lens, letting the moment be what it is. A mask of his own face now invites others to do the same. It Is Us invites people to choose a part of their body they feel strongly about; Dekker photographs it, anonymously, and the prints are brought together into collective bodies, uneven and unidealised. The Zine Project went deeper, one person, place or theme at a time, in ten handmade editions that sold out within minutes. Innate Curiosity turns to looking itself: objects rebuilt from a childhood before the internet, the gap in the blinds, the discarded magazine, asking what becomes of curiosity when the algorithm serves it before you have had to seek.

What runs through all of it is trust. Dekker works with people who trust him enough to show themselves. His part is to give them a stage, and to present them as they chose to appear. The question underneath never changes: how we look at one another, and how we want to be seen.