Sander Dekker (Amsterdam, 1980) is an artist working with photography, installation and self-published books and zines.
His work centres on how people present themselves — to each other, to cameras, and to the world they build around themselves. The core of his practice is The Social Media Project, a decade-long series of encounters with strangers photographed in their own homes after first contact online. It caught something specific: a brief moment when reaching out to a stranger felt open, easy and charged with possibility. That openness is slowly disappearing.
The questions that project raised have continued to drive everything since — through permanent installations, handmade publications, participatory work, and ongoing projects centred on people who push back against external pressure simply by being fully, visibly themselves.
In 2011, Dekker began reaching out to strangers on social media with a simple request: let me photograph you in your own home. Most said yes. A decade-long document of a specific kind of human openness — caught just before it closed. An archive of encounters that increasingly feel like they belong to another era.
Thousands of black-and-white photographs, each ten by fifteen centimetres, presented side by side in a large-scale installation. Individually intimate. Together an overwhelming landscape that mirrors the endless social media scroll. Permanently installed at Hotel Not Hotel Amsterdam, Torch Gallery, Strayfield Gallery Copenhagen, and Leica Store Lisse.
Ten handmade, limited-edition zines made between 2021 and 2025 — each a short trip to Paris, Warsaw, Mexico, Amsterdam, Asia. No publisher, no brief, no compromises. All ten editions sold out. The complete set shown at Josilda da Conceição Gallery and Torch Gallery Amsterdam.
A series of physical installations that withhold — demanding that you lean in, reach in, look for yourself. Closed aluminium blinds concealing a backlit photograph. A railway bin containing a handmade 1980s magazine. What happens to curiosity when discovery is served rather than earned?