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.

Dr. Françoise Fermin wanted to be a sculptor when she first studied, at art school. She soon switched to medicine, but gravitated towards surgery and soon specialised in cosmetic surgery. She is regarded as one of the world's experts on the reconstruction of ears, a niche by which she came into contact with victims of the LRA in Uganda, many of who had ears amputated as a punishment or a threat.

These images show her, along with her mentee Dr. Joseph Dusseldorp, working to first remove rib cartilage, then shape it into an ear, then insert that form under the skin of the skull. The cartilage is accepted by the body because it is 'of' the body, and soon the skin attaches to it and grows comfortably. The result, as seen in the final image of this series, is a realistic ear which helps its owner in the process of healing.

These images were commissioned by Neon Magazine (FR) to accompany an article written by Arnaud Aubry.