Rather than glamour, then, it is this living ruin which the photographs of Taptik seek: the place
of the individual carving out a space of life within and despite the city, as though swearing at it. (..)
Yet the photographs do not capture these subjects as lost or pathetic, but rather as defiant, as though they
opt out of the city as a form of voting, as a means of representing themselves in the alternative,
sequestered places of the city which are not represented by municipal fictions such as elections and
administrations who recycle nostalgia to brand the city. By featuring actual lived spaces, Taptik represents
the ruin that comes not from a weighty past, but from a weighty and largely young population that often
cannot see its future. In doing so, he gives his subjects a presence that exposes their absent voice.
Turning away from the city’s historic legacy, from the picturesque frame of how it is supposed to be seen,
the photographs of Taptik provide a vision onto an actual modern city which expresses itself democratically,
and suggest through the image how a democratic society might learn, in this new generation, to express
itself politically as well." Wendy M.K. Shaw on Familiar Strangers