Georgina Richardson was born to Australian and Swiss parents in Hong Kong in 1980. Living in the tropical humidity of China, she saw blood-red sunsets and watched her father strategically light the Buddha statues he dotted around their museum-like house. In 1988 she moved to the UK and was given a grey woolen cape as part of her new school uniform. Later, at age 12 she started to learn how to take pictures and develop them in the darkroom.

She started studying to become a doctor at Sydney University, but soon realised she was too emotionally sensitive and dropped out, whereupon she went to India and took thousands of photographs of people there.

In 2000, she attended Parsons School of Design, first in Paris for two years, and then in New York, graduating in 2005, when she won the MaxMara award. She ran the studio of Jonathan Becker and assisted several advertising and fine art photographers, including Mary Ellen Mark and Gail Albert Halaban. She produced advertising jobs for i2i Photography, run by Catherine Chermayeff. Larry Fink and David Leventhal critiqued her work along the way.

In her photographs, she looks for “authentic” expression in human interactions and experiences, despite, one may argue, authenticity’s total absence in a photograph. She seeks, what appears to be, the uncomfortable, hypocritical, paranoid, lonely and often unbearably ridiculous moments of living in the comforts of Western society, where one is spoiled for time and obsessive about one’s state of “happiness”.

And photography has allowed Georgina to explore her own sense of well-being in Western society through a form of objectification of her subjects:

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” (from Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”)

In 2010, Hong Kong Land commissioned her to take a series of portraits as part of a week-long solo exhibition in Central. Her work has appeared in British Vogue, ID Magazine and New York Magazine. Since 2011, she began working on a project of portraits of American life.