Anonymous: defaced, unfaced, 2faced and overfaced

April 3, 2013

I’m not sure from where this came from, maybe it’s just Magritte’s fault, but it seems even more obvious nowadays with photography: the de-identification of one. We don’t want to see your face. We don’t need it. In fact, your face will distract the concept I want to work and show.

by Magritte

I didn’t talk with any of my psychologist or psychiatric friends to try to understand this no-face movement. I didn’t read anything on Freud or Jung either about this. I’m just wondering the need of de-facing people; the needs of erase ones’ identity.

Maybe it came with internet, the social networks of no face people. The anonymous. But these are not masks that are use to express other feelings. Sometimes it seems almost a voodoo you want to make deleting someone’s face. For you to not think about that person. So you put whatever you want over the face and then you get it: I wanted a human being, not that specific person, so I deleted or hide the face.  Most of these photographs are done with collages. So you use old photos or even take one yourself and over the portrait you put flowers, or stones. You paint or you do some broidery. Anything goes just to cover the portrait’s identity.

Self-portrait by ©Gonzalo Bénard

There’s now someone who’s no one.

by ©Psychic Licks

by ©David Szauder

by ©Heitor Magno

by ©Jesse Draxler

by ©Jesse Morgan Barnett

by ©Julie Cockburn

by ©Thomas Robson

by ©Ugo Foscolo

by ©Sergei Sviatchenko

Maybe if you ask Susan Blasco “¿What do you do in life?” you’ll get an answer: “I’m a master in defacing dead people”.  And we’re thankful for that.

by ©Susana Blasco

Would you be pleased if a photographer would put a brocoli on your mouth to cover it all?

Brocoli Face, by ©Gonzalo Bénard

Anyway, to compensate, there’s always unveiled beauties and wonderful portraits.

#11 from The Mourners, 2011, by ©Georgia Metaxas

 

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text by ©Gonzalo Bénard for 2HeadS
April, 2013
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For any other contact about 2HeadS or my Photographic Work, from Art Galleries, Curators, Art Collectors, etc, please use the GBénard/2HeadS email. Thank you.

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