Joel Daniel Phillips is an American artist best known for his realist life-size portraits, particularly of San Francisco, California residents that highlight disenfranchised segments of the population.
For Phillips, the focus on fringe populations represented “a visual record of my striving to recognize unknown and unnoticed individuals through the tip of my pencil.”[5] Phillips was the third-place winner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2016.
[6] The winning portrait titled “Eugene #4” was of a gentleman he met on the corner of Sixth and Mission Streets in San Francisco, where Phillips lived from 2011 to 2016.
The works are a response to a subset of the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) foundational commissioned photographs of the Great Depression.
[9] These collaborative works have been the subject of gallery exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles and Oslo, Norway.