The Face of Tomorrow
This photographer has taken hundreds of photographs of men and women who live in cities across the world. For each city he has digitally composed one face for men and one for women in an attempt to visualise what that city's future inhabitants might look like. For reasons which he explains on the project site, it's not census proportioned, tourism interferes, and the male and female faces tend to look similar. Here's the future face of London.
Rest of the project at The Face of Tomorrow
His other photographs might appeal to certain amongst you - Istanbul Mike
He mentions Nancy Burson as another photographer looking at related ideas.
posted by Anonymous @ 1:44 pm
5 comments
5 Comments:
It's funny - mixed race (for want of a better term) kids always seem to look better, but these "supercomposites", as he calls them, seem a bit bland next to the fabulous hodgepodge of differently coloured faces from which they're constructed. There's something very nice and exciting about the vast differences in how people look in a cosmopolitan city. Our bit of Camberwell is Polish, African and Cypriot, for instance, and I really like the contrasting looks.
I guess what happens, though, is that a city such as ours gets teh best of both worlds: 20 years from now, the Poles and Africans will be having gorgeous babies together, but at teh same time the city's visual heterogeneity will continue to be replenished by immigration from the four corners of the globe.
I emailed the photographer and asked if he wanted some more photos that were representative of London. One of the things he identified as a problem was the ethnic mix of the location he chose, Tate Modern. I asked him if he wanted a census-based sample. Here's his answer:
"Hi Trevor and thanks for your interest. Yes I would love to have another face for London. In regards to the ethnic makeup of the faces,
each composite face is only a reflection of that particular location (eg Tate Gallery) on that particular day. Only once we have several
locations in a city (like Sao Paulo) can we truly create a super-composite that can be said to be representative of that city.
So in regards to your question, don't specifically try and aim for a particular ethnic mix - just photograph the first 100 people that you
can convince. If you want to get a place that seems to reflect London's diversity more, then maybe do the shoot in Brixton or Brick
Lane or even Piccadilly Circus which will have more diversity and perhaps be a truer reflection of "London". Let me know how you go, Cheers Mike"
So, does anyone fancy going to Brixton, Brick Lane and Piccadilly one day with a couple of digital cameras and getting people to participate?
What I found scary was the amazing similarity between the composite faces from different parts of the world. They all seem to tend to a kind of 20-something, just-the-wrong-side-of-very-attractive dark-haired person. Were all the subjects the same age? Why is this 'typical'? Surely, with an ageing population, 'typical' is more likely to be older than 20-something...
I might be up for this, Trevor (time permitting), so long as you promise that we won't include any pics from Vauxhall on a Sunday. Though now that I think about it, it might be fun to skew the sample towards dilated pupils, copious sweat, and furiously gurning jaws, making London look a bit more like a city of the damned.
Re: Barry's comment. The photographer recognises what you say as a feature of genetics and social trends:
"With 64 or 128 individuals, cities start to approach a human type and the end result is no longer interesting - except as a manifestation of this phenomena. This is something that has also been explored by several other artists, most notably Nancy Burson, so there is need to retread this territory."
"The nature of society, in which inevitably, even in the most advanced liberal democracies, there are more men than women on the street, means that in a typical photoshoot we get about one third females and two thirds males. We can’t always rely on there being 32 females, so it ends up that the number that it is convenient to work with is 16. From early research this was found to be sufficient to give an idea of the future face of that location with a high degree of consistency. In fact, we know that we have a representative face because the male and the female face for a particular location, always end up looking like brother and sister, even though each is made up of a batch of entirely unrelated individuals."
"The Face of Tomorrow is a youthful face. Right now 25 is the average age of all people on the planet."
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