About
Richard Cawood is a UK-born portrait photographer, educator, and creative based in Dubai. His work blends decades of experience in design, media, and education with a minimalist photographic style that seeks honesty, emotion, and presence in every frame.
Richard’s portrait series The Faces of the Unknown is composed entirely of AI-generated imagery, created to explore the eerie space of the uncanny valley and challenge our perception of what feels real. His more recent project, The Faces of Mexico, combines both real and AI-generated portraits, emerging as a direct response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Together, these two series examine the evolving relationship between photography, truth, and perception in an age where reality can be convincingly simulated.
Richard’s style, often described as emotive minimalism, is grounded in simplicity, precision, and a desire to reveal the quiet dignity in every face, whether real or imagined.
He studied photography as an undergraduate and earned a master’s degree in electronic media, both from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP). He has worked across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, with past collaborations that include global brands like Nike, Virgin America, and Hulu. His photography has been featured by ZEISS and published internationally.
He currently teaches at Zayed University’s College of Arts and Creative Enterprises (CACE) in Dubai and continues to explore how emerging technologies like AI are reshaping the way we see, feel, and create. You can connect with Richard on LinkedIn.
This is an AI-Infused Space
The Faces of the Unknown is not a portfolio. It started in 2022 as an experiment, a place where human creativity and artificial intelligence meet. The results can be surprising, sometimes even unsettling. Everything here carries the HUMAN/MACHINE mark. Each portrait and each piece of writing grows out of a process where intent and code overlap, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict.
The portraits are AI-generated. The words you are reading are also shaped in collaboration with a language model. I do not use AI as a shortcut. I use it as a partner to think with, to argue with, to push against. The mark you see is not a warning. It is a signal. It asks you to slow down and to consider that authorship is no longer a single voice. It is many voices working at once.
I know this can feel uncomfortable. That discomfort is part of why I am doing it. Where does authorship begin and end? How do we decide what feels real? What does it mean to create when our tools also create back?
I want to be clear about the process, not to lessen the work, but to open it up. The tension between human and machine, between intuition and algorithm, between presence and simulation, is what drives this project.
It is not only about what you see. It is about how you see. As you move through these images and words, you step into an experiment that asks you to look again, to question, and to find your own ground between face and frame.
