We truly believe that every new person you meet brings something new to your life (for better or for worse). You learn from each other, you have fun, you talk, maybe your cry, but most importantly you share these moments together which make insignificant moments quite significant. It seems like Tinder is becoming a great tool to foster these new relationships. What we used to know as a dating app, it has grown into something much more.
Photographer Josh Downs has a fascination with Tinder dates and is exploring the discomfort, the unfamiliarity, the excitement and the humanity of these new relationships. His project Matches, involves him reaching out to people that he’s connected with on dating apps, to meet them for the first time and to capture a photo for a portrait series. It’s a peculiar and revealing process, ‘Tinder says that we’re compatible,’ he says, ‘and at some stage we obviously both swiped right on each others profiles, so there’s this noticeable tension and awkward energy to the shoots’. It puts the subjects slightly on edge when meeting him, and it’s not, he promises, just a mischievous way to go on dates.
Artemis, 21, 2 miles away
Josh’s in-your-face photos look to capture the contradictions he experienced on Tinder. He employs an uneasily close angle, which on the one hand makes the photos incredibly personal – they’re detailed and revealing, lit with a stark white flash – yet the proximity, provokes discomfort in the subject, there’s a guarded unease in the pose and the expression of his subjects.
Yasmin, 23, 13 miles away
The portraits are slightly different than usual Tinder profile pictures. They’re a bit more natural as Josh want’s to break through the online facades that people build online – to capture the subject’s humanity in the moment when our cyber personas meet our real-world selves. ‘When we first meet it’s a fascinating moment,’ he said, ‘it’s this point when our online and real-world personas kind of clash – for better or worse!’.
Veronica, 26, 2 miles away
The relationship between subject and photographer is also an interesting element and the process of setting up meetings for the shoot feels like a performance art piece in itself. Swiping right instantly created a bond between Josh and the subject, the basis to start a relationship, yet in some ways it was built on a facade; influenced by each other’s heavily-filtered photos and irreverent emoticons.
“The matches are all so different” according to Josh, “but at the same time they’re all united in the fact that they actually said yes to my portrait proposal – I was ignored and shot down by a fair few!”
The process of arranging the shoot, meeting at typical dating spots, being stood up on occasion and having to use a charm offensive were all part of the process and reflect the real thing.
‘It’s been a weird project’ Josh said, but the process and the portraits were a necessary mechanism to explore an interesting moment which more and more people can now relate to. Tinder matches are created online but the the dates are based in reality; they’re often awkward, normally revealing and at the end of the day completely human.