🎥📸🎧 This Is What We Can Do. And That, Too, Is Art.

Sometimes, we use licensed, high-quality video footage. Not as a shortcut, not as a trick. But because our bodies can no longer carry the weight of the gear, the wait, the weather. We still see. Still compose. Still cut.
The footage is our raw clay — shaped by instinct, edited with care, coloured by pain, and timed to sound. What you’re watching is not stock. It’s vision. Ours.

We used to shoot everything. Between us we’ve built a massive back catalogue of photography — four decades of captured light and stories. Film, darkroom, digital. Street, fashion, photojournalism. Real cameras. Real chemicals. Real time. Our archive holds what so many now simulate. And yet — this isn’t about proving credentials. It’s about setting the record straight.

Because when you create from the margins — when you’re older, disabled, out of step with algorithm culture — people start to ask the wrong questions.

“But did you really make this?”
“How much is yours?”
“Isn’t it just AI?”

No.
What you’re seeing and hearing is built on analogue skills, stitched with trained composition, and underpinned by years of learning — photography, music, writing, journalism, coding. Not to impress. But to survive. Because that’s what art has become for us: a survival language.

I was a cellist. Trained. Forty years with that instrument under my skin. I had to stop playing in 2015. The body said no, but the sound didn’t leave. So now we compose with DAWs, samples, field recordings, fragments of older sessions. We make stories in waveform. It’s not less — it’s different. It’s what’s possible.

There’s a myth that real artists are ageless, tireless, always emerging. That anything made with help, or from the sidelines, somehow matters less. That illness is an inconvenience, and age a soft decline.

But listen: we are still here. Still making. Still transmitting.

The edits are slower. The pain is constant. But the vision has never been sharper.

What we want is not pity. Not even praise. Just recognition:
That art made with limits is still art.
That art made through disability is still full of force.
That the artist doesn’t fade just because the body falters.
That age adds weight, not rust.

This isn’t content. This is our record. A living archive.
Of what we saw.
Of what we still see.
Of what we’ve refused to let go.

If you’re reading this and you’re creating from a place of illness, of age, of constraint:
You’re not behind.
You’re not obsolete.
You’re not alone.

You’re making something only you can make.

And that, too, is art.

—Art of FACELESS

Featured image: MSUX Polaroid collage by Art of FACELESS. Photography by Seren. © 2025 Art of FACELESS