ID portraits

There is the first image at the top on the left, it’s the photography of the person, framed around his or her face. Everyone sees this person like this, this way. 

But it’s not the same for the picture on the top right; it’s the face as the person sees it every morning in the mirror. 

Those two portraits could be the same if human beings were perfectly symmetrical. They aren’t. Our right side is not identical to our left side. 

Now, let’s take the face at the bottom left. It’s the face that gathers the right side of the face and it’s double but reversed. Next to it, we see the result of the same pasting technique; here is the left side of the face, on both sides.

The technique of the symmetrical reconstruction of the face is not new, I didn’t create anything. In 1930, Pierre Abraham showed a series of portraits reconstructed this way during the fourth International Institute of Anthropology Congress. 

I wanted to know the different faces of my friends, my family and also mine. Each time, when the two sides of the face joined, a new person would appear, alive, but whom I didn’t know, and I felt flabbergasted. I wanted to pursue this project with my colleagues, with people I knew, with several journalists from “les Inrocks”(I thought about offering my services to make the portraits of celebrities they interviewed, but it didn’t happen). In all, I made about sixty ID portraits.

I discovered myself as a “crazy” person and as an “American”. See here. I also saw this “sporty and madonna like person”, this “witch and Peruvian”, “dullard and handsome”...

I created these images in 2008. Other photographers have also played with these chimerical portraits. Some only show the two faces put together and many present them into a triptych including the initial portrait. My choice of presenting those four faces equally (including the face you see each morning in the mirror) is what makes my work different from the others. Without talking about these new portraits, of these pictured people who show more than what they intended to.