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: Client:

The Hand That Feeds
The Hague, Rotterdam, Kampala, Entebbe
N/A

Accompanies my MA thesis, available here, a PDF publication available here, and my thesis in tweet form, here.

This project took shape while I was balancing life as an employer in Uganda with studying in The Netherlands. I was drawn to Westlands, an area of dense agriculture outside of The Hague powered by workers from Europe's peripheries, mostly women, all paid minimum wage and hired as contractors rather than employees. These armies of unskilled-but-skilled hired hands spend their days caring for all kinds of agricultural produce, from the mundane to the seemingly spectacular. I shared a house with one such worker and in the evenings over dinner, I listened to her stories. Despite requiring dexterity, dedication and punishing hours, the jobs she described to me were always classed as unskilled and the pricepoint for labour set accordingly.

Humans’ intelligence and adaptability, organised and multiplied by the same handheld devices that we all use every day, enables employers across the world to treat labour as a utility, drawing from a pool of available bodies to keep the wheels of a planetary-scale just-in-time machine turning. The orchids that sell for discounted prices at the petrol station and the vegetables you buy at the supermarket are cheap because they are picked and packed by workers like these, earning less than a living wage. Systems of management extend beyond the borders that govern ordinary people, and national laws struggle to keep up with the internet-enabled speed of global commerce. I was still partly based in Uganda at this point, and it shocked me that instead of Uganda getting closer to Europe in terms of workers’ protections, the opposite seemed true.

I started collecting pictures of the signs I saw of this world of precarity, and when it came time to propose a main project for my MA I decided to continue with the topic. But as I began to dig into the topic and talk to more people, I was beset by doubts. First, the people I met and spoke to refused to fit the narrative that I had anticipated. The workers from the East approach their seasonal work with no illusions- they share houses, live cheaply and save everything they earn. These jobs offer great opportunities for progression, as anybody with the right eyes can see. In Uganda everybody I spoke to wanted to tell me stories of their successes and victories much more than talking about their troubles. I came to realise that the real damage done by these kinds of jobs is invisible- it is the replacement of the long term with the short, a situation which generates quick profits but cannot last.

Which brought me to my other doubts, which were about the purpose of the images. They would live in a book, or maybe in a gallery, accompanied by careful captions. Wealthy audiences would look at them and feel concerned. Perhaps somebody would buy a print. Meanwhile the people in the pictures would get up and go to work again. The winds of change in global systems matter to their lives, but so too does putting shoes on their children’s feet. It is that spirit which these images tell, far more than the story of the erosion of workers' rights. There is harm being done, make no mistake, but the people in these pictures are the heroes of their own stories and the broken systems are not their doing.

Photography often presents the worker as symbolic of the system that oppresses them. This is a dangerous conflation, but its mindless acceptance reveals that gallery audiences often have more in common with bosses than workers. For this reason, I decided that instead of a book I would format the publication for digital circulation. By shaping it for a mobile phone screen I hope to make it more accessible to the people who it talks about, and to make something that can be shared. If you enjoy reading it, please forward it to a friend. And when you buy flowers at a gas station, spare a thought for the hands that picked them.

Download the PDF here

A Conceptual Note:
I rephotographed my own screen as I browsed the book during my everyday life, recontextualising the images and the book in new and unexpected ways. This final act specifically draws on a concept I theorised during the course, which I call the circuitum, the layer of meaning an image gains from the sites in which it is seen and the screens on which it is encountered. The circuitum acknowledges the screen as a personalised space formed by its user in collaboration with algorithms, and asks the viewer to consider what that specific sight and sensation of seeing changes about the image itself. If that interests you, you’ll probably enjoy my MA thesis.

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