Will Boase


research // photo // etc 


**I’m updating my website over the Christmas break- apologies for any weirdness. Leaving Adobe after 15 years is surprisingly difficult**

Photography researcher and doctoral student living in Rotterdam, NL. Fascinated by the (after)lives of photographs and wider digital visual media, how photography makes the world, and how photographers can do a better job of communicating. Since September 2025 I study this as part of the Doctoral Programme in Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University, Helsinki. I continue to freelance as a photographer, writer, and teacher around visual culture.

Initiator (with Andrea Stultiens) of the Dutch Royal Academy of Art’s Networked Audience research group, current member of Aalto University’s Image Matters doctoral research group. Occasional lecturer on photography theory and practice, including for Fotea, and more recently on AI imagery from a curious skeptic’s perspective, teaching positive and negative use cases for a variety of audiences.

At the moment I am interested in developing projects around AI literacy and the roles photography could play in establising or strengthening consensus reality, so if that’s the kind of thing you’re into, I would love to hear from you!

Want to contact me? my gmail is willboase.
My phone number is somewhere on the internet too.
Seeking parasocial proximity? Here’s my IG.



Project:
Location:
Partners:
Funder:


Circulations
Kampala, Uganda
Dead Pixels, Fotea Foundation
HiVOS

Documented at this website, WhatsApp chatbot available here.


Conceptualised together with the Fotea Foundation and with funding from Hivos, this was an experimental publishing initiative in Kampala. We brought together five expert facilitators and eight participants to answer one question: 

How do we reach new audiences with photography?

The process was the focus, and we facilitated long discussions about the role of the photographer, the effects of mediation by outside actors, and the narrative potential made possible if the global north is removed from its position as gatekeeper. We experimented with narrative structures, publishing forms and alternative sharing approaches. In the end we created a WhatsApp chatbot which acts as a digital 'bookshelf', allowing audiences to request PDF files of publications, receive images direct to their handsets, and click through link-rich documents to explore topics for themselves. 




The outcomes of this project are wide-ranging, but if you'd like to learn more I encourage you to test out the bot, download the toolkit, visit the instagram page, and read about the participants and their projects on the website (which also has a cool stats page so you can see how visitors use it).

This project was created as part of my work in the Networked Audience research group at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, NL.




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