About Face is a series of site-specific portraits of personalities that I have selected from my “friends” on FaceBook.* These gratis portrayals are those that I find of great interest, inspiring and readymade for portraiture, rich with character and resonant with personality. Within the process of fashioning these portraits, I have learned something about each subject and the project as a whole. It has helped me consider and test an expanded definition of “friendship,” some legal limits of appropriation and fair use, as well as operating within a legally circuitous social vehicle such as FaceBook. Ultimately, this project has offered me an opportunity to practice a genre I have not yet found myself within — portraiture through a classic Warholian model.

I believe portraiture to be a universal and iconic language. Everyone can identify and understand what “it” is, regardless of the style, artistry and referencing. A likeness of a person that is created by an artist is mutually a portrait of that person and a work in its own right. We might read this as a picture of someone that is also about the picture itself, and therefore, to be read at face value.

Every mirror reflects our gaze and likeness. Each lens will focus and frame and every mark indicates an aspect of the moment. The ways in which we hold this mirror, focus the lens, and make our mark affects our subject and the meaning of our activity. This picturing, this rendering in method and signature, from a specific point of view and context, reflects and reveals that our world exists and is significant, and that our likeness reflected reveals a counterpart, a duality of existence as being and symbol. I believe that when we look into this book of faces we fix our eyes on our own reflection, the expression of identity.

*The entire project can be found at my Facebook page.