The Lab: Decoy is a photography brief with a twist. Created by Canon Australia, it’s an interesting social experiment in how our opinions shape how we judge people before we really get to know them. They wanted to know whether a photograph would be shaped more by the person behind the camera than by what’s in front of it:
The assignment was to shoot the man and capture his true personality. But here’s the catch…Each photographer was given a different version of the man’s life story, including a self-made millionaire, someone who has saved a life, an ex-inmate, a commercial fisherman, a psychic, and a recovering alcoholic.
In reality, all of these life stories are made up…but the photographers didn’t know this.
It’s an interesting social experiment, demonstrating quite clearly how the photographer’s inner vision, bias and perception shapes their eventual creative work, leading into a wider social question over how popular media is often driven by the biases of the media creators themselves. Recently this has popped up in viral social campaigns, particularly in the USA in support of civil rights and the different way minorities are assessed, described and treated by the media.
More about The Lab here.