The Magnificent

Nowadays people have a chance to photograph the world around using their smartphones and constantly share these images in social networks. Despite this fact the most popular type of photography among internet users is being a selfie. If you login to any photography or dating network you will be able to see millions of faces from every corner of the planet. People use new technologies to display their make-ups, bodies or even plastic surgeries to the world in order to get attention, new friends, likes or whatsoever. For the last 2 months I surfed through the pages of some of the most popular international social and dating networks. I looked at the faces of completely strange people residing somewhere very far or maybe living the next door to my apartment. Sometimes after 2 hours of surfing I could not even remember a face from the thousands I just looked at. They merged into a single сollage inside of my head. That was how the idea of making the present project came to me. During the last 2 months I downloaded 100 best selfies from the social and dating networks every day. Selfies were offered to me by the networks as the most liked by other internet users during a day. I manually merged these 100 pictures layering them in photoediting programme using the same level of transparency which made every portrait equal in the final collage. I was really surprised how easily some selfies layered on each other - trying to look magnificent in the lense of their smartphones the authors of these pictures were acting quite stereotypically, posing, gesticulating, smiling exactly the same way. As a result I had an image of an average "selfier" every day displaying the stereotyped idea of good-looking in an abstract way, the the portrait of the modern man - the Magnificent. In accordance with the policies of the networks from where I took the images - there is no rule restricting to download the images of the users or to use these images in an artwork.