Face Away is the working title of a long-term project, starting in 2010, in studying and investigating photographs showing human faces damaged, distorted, and interrupted.
What interests me here is not only photographs clearly displaying damage done to faces by whatever natural cause, but also the routes photographs travel through archives, newspapers, people's hands (and pictures surviving earthquakes for example), and how those processes are able to interrupt and deform otherwise clean portrayals of human faces.
Another focus will be the ways culture and history informs us in the creation of concepts regarding the 'perfect' face, thereby discarding 'non-perfect' faces as being odd. In its extremity (Nazism) this has led to deadly (literally) serious, and in retrospect, paradoxically funny, comparisons of off-standard faces with cubist art.
Whatever the cause of dis-facing is, seeing 'broken' and 'desacrated' faces can be a profoundly disruptive experience.
I hope to publish a web site, book or scroll in which questions around face distortion in photography will be posed, and partly answered, in both a poetic and philosophical manner.
More information to come ...
