Car Stuffed Toy Pattern

Clues (4) - Archaeology of the face

Franco Castellari, Portrait with genealogy

There is a place where memory is deposited merciless at times intrusive, sometimes silently, almost imperceptibly. This place is the body or, more specifically, her discovery region: the face.

There are many things etched in the faces: our descendants the traces left by the painful history, those impressed by fatigue, illness or those inexorable time. Traces silent, waiting to be read, that photography has collected and variously represented.

face is hidden in our genealogy, one that more or less consciously seek every time we say a person "He has the eyes of his mother, his father's mouth, the eyes of a grandfather ... ".

Look at the faces this perspective is taken as a small archaeological dig, back to the tracks recorded in our genetic traits, to reconstruct the history of underground forms of our face, and with them, including that of our presence in the world.

I found interesting is the approach adopted by photographer Franco Castellari Piedmont during a workshop dedicated to portraits ( Looking for Ahab ). Castellari, with the use of a partial double exposure, has created a self-portrait in which they appear to be your face (today) is the portrait of his father (the origins), superimposed unobtrusively in the shadows.

The result is an image of a face represented in depth, showing both its present and its past. An act of archeology photography that has shaped invisibility of the roots. The presence of a watermark of the father figure is the visual equivalent of a private family history: the discovery of its "geological". It 's a picture that says "I now have this, but they are because there have been another body and another face - that's what emerges in the shadows - which created the face that are now " .