Layered Identities

This work started in February 2017 as an approach to question the idea of identity. Triggered by the recent vote in the UK referendum to leave the European Union and the underlying question “what is it to be European?”, I decided to play with passports and confront them with their owners. Portrait photographs from official documents such as passports and identity cards were scanned and then digitally projected on the subject’s face. The subjects were sitting on a chair isolated in a studio with their eyes closed. The pictures are taken at various points during the process of adjusting the scales of the superimposed image in an impossible attempt to perfectly match the biometric passport photo back onto the subject’s face. Even though these are the same faces, the act of trying to match them (a process that occurs during biometric passport checks experienced during border crossings) creates visual conflicts that give way to a new, completely unexpected and uncontrolled face. Most subjects reacted that the images were “disturbing’’ or “weird’’ when they first saw the result. One also said: “ I look like a monster”. Perhaps the ‘monster’ is the uncanny composite of private and public identity modes: the integration of social media and state control in an increasingly authoritarian world? These distorted portraits, layered identities, question the portrait’s legitimacy to represent and convey one’s identity in a world of hypervisibility in which the recording and registering of the face is a central tool of integrated global surveillance systems.