MacDonaldStrand is the collaborative partnership of Clare Strand and Gordon MacDonald. Their joint practice centres on institutional and industry Critique, producing work that responds to photographic history, politics, and the conventions of image-making.

A “false flag” operation is an act committed with the intent to disguise the actual source of responsibility, pinning blame on another party. This work has been developed from an earlier project titled No More Flags, in which photographs of extreme right-wing marches in the UK and USA were edited to remove nationalist flags. Calling this process “cathartic Photoshopping”, MacDonaldStrand’s aim was to withdraw the asserted legitimacy of the flag-waving, faux-patriotism of these marches. The resulting images showed remarkably similar protagonists marching with blank flags, exposing what the artists saw as the dull, monocultural, selfish and diminished society that the flag-bearers wish to celebrate. After publicising the project, MacDonaldStrand was fined thousands of pounds by a web-scraping bot copyright company which detects infringement of the use of photo agency images. The same copyright company had also targeted and fined community groups, small charities, local history societies and unwitting individuals who had used an image on their blog or shared on social media. Ultimately the project was withdrawn. 

False Flags takes large-scale flags made of images from the No More Flags project, originally produced for display in their entirety, and presents them as burial flags, folded in the ceremonial shape of a triangle. The project critiques the unbalanced exposure that right-wing fringe groups are given in the contemporary media landscape, as well as the commercial systems at play in the distribution of these images.