The idea that every person sees a different reality is fascinating to me. My own face appears in my mind differently than it does to my parents. How then do we connect all the dots to live in a relatively cohesive world? If I question everything about how we perceive faces, this also brings into question how we perceive feelings, fears and emotions. This visual imposition on the face is where perception comes into play—what are we actually experiencing when looking at a face? The face can display an array of emotions that can be difficult to detect, so how do we recognize these complex, yet justified, feelings?

I have never truly seen my own face. I see reflections in mirrors and reversed images in selfies– but often these images do not give me any introspection with regard to my emotional context. What would I see if I were to look deeper into a face: into the folds of skin or below the surface of whatever context those face exists in superficially? Who would that face belong to? Why are some pictures of you bad and some pictures good? They are all you. It is all the same face. These differences between good and bad have come to determine what makes a good Selfie and how much makeup or editing is needed. Yet that face is the same as the one in an unedited and twisted, underexposed image. Distortion of images can be subjectively positive or negative, but why can we call one face ugly when another one is beautiful? And how much distortion must happen until it is unrecognizable?

If faces can be recognized in everyday objects such as an electrical outlet or the front of a car, how is it that a real human face could not have enough stimuli to warrant recognition as a face? Our minds are conditioned to put together the information we have into something that is recognizable– which is why we see a face in the headlights and bumper of a car. However, when we only have pieces of this information—a mouth for example— it becomes much more difficult to believe we are truly looking at a face. If the brain does not believe it is looking at a face, then what do we perceive we are looking at? And how do these complex visual stimuli then play into our overall understanding of the world and, subsequently, ourselves?

How is this relevant now and how does it stay relevant? There are so many selfies and model photos released into our environment that it becomes difficult to decipher what is real and what is not. We live in a world that is obsessed with the surface representation of a person. This obsession dilutes the underlying identity. If we look at a selfie that has been edited and photo shopped, are we still looking at a face? While it may be appealing, how is it different from a distorted image that is not appealing: both are not true to the face. It makes me questions what is being released out into the world and who is controlling that content. How will we continue to look at ourselves with over-edited images bombarding our senses? Maybe my photographed images are the abstract, anti-selfie. Or the deconstruction of a selfie down to true identity.

I have always been fascinated by faces and how we perceive them. As a psychology major with an art minor, I had a broad and unidentifiable urge to cross the divide and come up with a project that would blend these two passions into one: an exploratory look into the human condition. Perception, face recognition, and the creative ability to merge the two were my driving forces. I stepped outside my box and began the process of this photographic journey.

The largest struggle I faced while working through these photos was to constantly push the limits and to constantly look for new angles and perspectives from which the face can be viewed. To me, merging photography and psychology seemed like an easy enough task. Essentially, psychology exists in everything. However, it is not easy to develop mentally stimulating images that still evoke some kind of in-depth thought process. While key elements of psychological theories can be found everywhere, I wanted to purposefully bring out factors of self-perception. I wanted to show emotion and the human face in an unconventional way.

In the early stages, I knew I wanted to work with faces. In fact, I went into this whole Senior Thesis project outlining exactly what I wanted my final product to look like and what I wanted my process to be like. If there is one piece of wisdom I can impart from this whole experience, it is that nothing in the artistic journey can be planned and nothing should be expected. Plans constrict growth and expectations inhibit creativity.

In my experience, any artistic endeavor often breaks down all sense of self confidence before you can get anywhere. Although I knew I wanted to work with faces, I first needed to be able to work with inanimate objects to show their own personas. Before I spread my abstractions to a living, breathing subject, I should understand how these emotions can be portrayed. This was an important step in starting off my Senior Thesis because right away it forced me to ignore my preconceived ideas of what an object is and to instead look at what it can be. I struggled with these inanimate objects. They did not speak to me. I was discouraged and I began to think my thesis was a mistake. All my images looked arbitrary and flat. I began looking into artists such as Mona Hatoum and her manipulation of objects to gain inspiration.

My first miniature goal was to elicit an emotion from everyday objects. Then, I chose objects that had a story such as pill bottles, money, or a broken mug. The broken mug was a turning point. The handle was missing and the way I shot the image produced the concept of photographing what is not really there. It was not a spectacular shot by any means, but there was an idea. That lead into the next goal of photographing what cannot be seen. This yielded shadows, objects moving in the wind, and a pair of empty pants on a chair. None of them spoke. These objects did not resonate with me and so I made the leap and moved on to photographing the face. Immediately I was reenergized.

If I learned anything about my photographic style in the first few weeks, it was that I am quite drawn to underexposed photographs. I like the absence and the drama. In my first week of shooting faces, I once again tried to shoot what was not there. I asked myself, what were the psychological ramifications of a photograph where only an eye is visible? What feelings could I elicit from showing people the outline of a darkened face? Immediately, there were hundreds of directions for this thesis to go in.

Faces brought rise to a new challenge for me: asking people to model. As an artist, I have found out that I am timid beyond my own good. Asking a variety of people to let me use their faces proved to be a challenge and often I fell back on people who were familiar to me. However, I always found it more interesting to use faces that were unfamiliar to me. That way I was not photographing with preconceived biases or wishes for what I expected of the outcome. It was an exciting challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. I looked into the work of Sally Mann and saw how powerful the images she produced were while still being simple and pleasing to the eye. While working with human faces I experienced constant frustration with not being able to clearly communicate what I wanted the models to do to coincide with what I saw in my mind.

Each week, I would explore a new concept of self-perception and add another set of shots to my arsenal. I once again tried to focus on photos that made one aspect of the person disappear such as a side of their face, their entire head, or a single feature. Next I took on new angles to view features from an unfamiliar side. I quickly moved on to distortions and using objects like fishing line or plastic wrap to mold and form the skin and features. Finally, I moved to self-portraits and finding ways to express myself and distort my own Selfie. The Selfie was difficult technically, but also conceptually. As I took more and more Selfies, I realized that all the photographs I had been taking of other people were also representations of me. All these people were simply stand-ins for what I was trying to depict, and them being my models allowed me to exercise my creativity with less boundaries.

I found myself growing more and more frustrated with the infinite number of ways to express the human face that I had not yet uncovered or encountered. The realities of classes and life led me to feel anger toward my camera that I could not bring it around everywhere with me (as well as perfect lighting situations) to capture everyday expressions that can also be seen as grotesque, abnormal, or plain confusing. I see pieces of my thesis in every person I pass, and yet I have not included them all in this endeavor as I would have liked. It would be impossible to capture all the faces to express the full spectrum of feelings, questions, fears and other fleeting moments that are casually displayed on the canvas of the face.

Overall, my process has focused on how to create a body of work. The art minor does not have a specific track or direction in mind when declared, and so I was able to dabble in different mediums instead of focusing in on one. Without going into an intensive program, I have never gone through the process of making art and struggling through creating something. Not only has this process been about coming up with a presentable and interesting idea for a body of work, but also how to utilize criticism and reflect the inspirations of other artists. Coming up with an overarching theme for my photos was a challenge: something complex, but not too confusing.

Throughout the process of creating a body of work, I experimented with multiple different methods to achieve the removed look of images that I intended. All these methods were exploratory in the development of this thesis and were influenced by different artists and their own methods.

Faces are a reflection into the soul, but that soul does not have to belong to the face holder. As I photographed and wrote and researched, all my findings came back to shine a light on myself. The unspoken fears that I have or the indescribable emotions I connect with are all demonstrated in one way or another on the faces of others. Although this journey started with a completely different goal, I think the discovery I have come up with is more important than any research paper I could have written. Leaving my four years of college, I am also leaving behind a capsule of experiences and memories that can be summed up in the faces of the moments I have lived. Andy Warhol said, “When I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a temporary condition and they don’t have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit the blemishes – they’re not part of the good picture you want.” (Warhol, 1977). I think this is part of the key to my thesis, which has focused on inner complexities of a photo and not necessarily what exists on the surface of the skin. Another interesting level to this project is that all of this was done through the lens of a mechanism completely removed from human consciousness. Although my camera was controlled by my hands and my thoughts, it operates relatively independently of the photograph subjects. There is purity to that uncertainty. My thesis has allowed me to explore more in depth those different areas I had always shoved down into the dark. By working superficially with the fears and emotions of others, I was able to contact my own fears and feelings and put those into my work as well.

Throughout this process I realized that there is so much more to the identity than we will ever see. By manipulating the Faceless Person and projecting my own experiences and emotions onto the faces of others, I can see that the subconscious is a place of uncertainty and questions. The human brain searches for recognition in any image or photograph (Rutledge, 2013). We ask what the content is trying to say or portray, and by taking my photographs in this direction, I was able to say, look at these emotions we all feel in a new way. In any discipline, whether it is scientific or humanities, understanding is about our shared differences and similarities. By projecting these by way of visuals, I bridged the gap one step further to understanding what goes on between us and within us. Art making is hard. It is confusing and frustrating, but by willing to go there, there is a sense of accomplishment simply by taking a chance.