Catalina Flores/ Faces

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In a city of approximately 1,537,195, we see so many faces that we rarely stop to look at or think about a single one. Yet faces are so often represented on city walls, street corners, inside subway stations, on storefronts. I thought that the representation of faces in the city was an interesting topic to choose for street photography, because of how they are manipulated, depicted, tampered with, and how even very abstract pictures have a familiarity about them that lets us know a face is there. I chose to order the photos from most objective to the most abstract.

The first three faces are pretty clear and realistic, but they are partially covered. The first is a photo of a sticker of Kim Kardashian place on top of an advertisement for Camel Cigarettes. Though I initially thought this was the most straightforward of the images, but upon further research I found that it displays a very subtle political message. Her cheek says NOH8, which I found out was a group of celebrities’ protest against the passing of Prop 8 in California, banning gay marriages. The second photo is a cardboard cutout of a man representing the New York Lottery and holding a sign over the bottom half of his face announcing the amount that is up for grabs this week. I found that when I cropped the picture to show only his face, he looks silly in a way. The third photo is an advertisement for the movie “Burlesque” in which Cher stars, but a simple dripping line of black paint over her eyes made it very disturbing to me.

The next next two are faces that have been photographed but look odd to the viewer because of photo editing. The fourth is a sticker advertising the band Naked Highway’s new album. The pink background contrasts with the black and white floating head, and how his mohawk and tongue sticking out makes him look like a drawing. The fifth picture is a poster of Katie Holmes, but the photo has been edited to look cartoonish and she was given the face paint of the Joker in Batman. I’m not sure of the meaning behind it but it has quite an eerie feel.

The next four photos are all cartoonish faces that are very unrealistic. The sixth picture I initially liked because it is an outline of a man’s face who is holding a tea cup that also has a face. I see this sticker often and I found out that it the “Where’s Cloud?” movement started when a man won a creativity contest and $1000 earlier this year that he used to travel across America and put these stickers everywhere. The seventh picture is of a stick figure that I found on a wall in Chinatown. It seems simple but also unique because of the way it is drawn: the mouth seems to be a half smile and half frown, but the halves are not in the middle and instead are on opposite sides of the face. The eighth picture is a cheerful little fellow with an oddly large mouth. The creator Dint Wooer says “he’s a goofy face that people like, he doesn’t mean anything.” The ninth photo is an abstract landscape with the sun shining on an otherwise dull town, with a simple but elegant face.

The final three photos are the most abstract and interesting to me. The tenth photo in my project is of a Mamma Mia advertisement in a train station that has been torn off but left an imprint of the coloring and part of the star’s face. My eleventh photo is of a face that seems accidental; it is a sticker of a man with a suit and no head, and another sticker of an O strategically placed on it’s neck, behind the O is the remains of a colorful sticker that has been mostly ripped away. This photo is different because it still looks like a face to me although it has no facial features. Finally, my last photo is of a smiley face that I found in a small crevice of a building in Brooklyn, I thought it was nice to conclude with because even though it is the least detailed, it means that someone stopped to put a smile there where it will always be seen.

I found that the trouble with executing my project was not in finding the faces on the street, but that there were an overwhelming amount that I could not choose which to photograph and which 12 fit together cohesively. All I had to do to get the photos for this project was take a walk through the city streets but pay extra close attention to the walls.