Xposure 2026
← Guests
Richard Cawood
When we take a moment to really see someone, something honest rises to the surface. It happens in the faces shaped by lived experience, and sometimes it happens again in the faces built from code. Both ask to be believed, and that quiet insistence stays with me long after the looking stops.
Richard Cawood was a UK-born portrait photographer and educator living in Dubai. Cawood crafts high-contrast emotive minimalism portraits while also researching AIs impact on image-making.
After earning BFA and MFA degrees at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning (DAAP), Cawood taught new-media production at Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music and later led faculty innovation initiatives at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. Since 2018 he has been a professor at Zayed University.
Cawood’s long-form projects examine perception and identity. His The Faces of the Unknown series (2019 – ongoing) explores the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and traditional photography. Its next chapter, The Faces of Mexico: A Study in Truth & Perception, will debut at Xposure 2026. This new body of work invites viewers to question what they accept as real.
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