Daniel Boschung
The composed mega-portraits are disturbing. Face Cartography is the Swiss publicity and news photographer Daniel Boschung’s latest project. He maps faces. Instead of taking pictures himself, he removes himself from the process by delegating the work to an ABB industrial robot controlled by specially customized software. The standardized portraits make a surprising impact. Each picture consists of about 600 single shots comprising 900 million pixels. The result is hype-realistic. Stubble turns into a trunk, a wrinkle into a canyon, a nostril into a cavern. These facial landscapes are dismaying—why? Emotions are completely absent. They appear only briefly, while macro photography takes half an hour. The human subject has to remain motionless while being photographed by the robot.
