|
Photo District News
Face Off
Portrait photographer Eric Myer challenges stereotypes online.
By Jay DeFoore/ Photo District News
When looking for a fun way to keep prospective clients interested in his Web site, California-based portraitist Eric Myer turned to a pop-up children’s book he had discovered while reading to his daughter eight years earlier. With the pages split in half horizontally, the book allowed children to create humorous hybrid animals by matching the head of one creature with the body of another.
The combinations were so intriguing that Myer began to wonder what would happen if he applied the concept to his portrait work. “I thought it would be fun to play with people’s faces," Myer admits. But what began as a lark soon took on significant sociological undertones when Myer realized he could subvert popular stereotypes along racial, gender and age lines.
“Like it or not, we all make judgments when we see people for the first time, ”Myer says. “I think it’s fascinating how we judge people so quickly by their appearance, and we do it even when we think we’re being evenhanded and judicious.”
Myer aimed to play off these prejudices by creating a user interface that allowed Web surfers to mix and match facial and body features of models shot in his studio. By cutting the headshots in half just between the nose and upper lip, he could rearrange the pieces in new combinations that could be either believable or downright disturbing. Visitors to Myer’s site can click on the section titled “Stereotypes” and discover the joys of matching a man’s hair, eyes and nose with a woman’s lips, chin and shoulders.
Once he had the idea firmly in place, Myer began casting for stereotypical character faces — the more eccentric, the better. Through Los Angeles agency Dragon Talent, Myer found several models that fit the profile he was looking for. He picked nerds, jocks, punks, a few beautiful women and even a cowboy.
“It’s like taking a big batch of DNA and mixing it up,” Myer says of the combinations.
Once he had photographed all the models, including his own daughter and the stylist’s son, Myer and his assistant scanned the film and began the digital work in Photoshop. The first thing they did was come up with a grid system to measure the width and height of the faces. Each cut had to be in precisely the right place or the combined images wouldn’t match.
They then devised a universal skin tone for each face, making the light faces darker and the dark faces lighter. Next up was smoothing out the transition areas in Photoshop, so that baby fresh skin wouldn’t look completely absurd paired with a 5 o’clock shadow. (Beards and mustaches were definitely out.) “Given that it was on the Internet at 72 dpi, it was very forgiving,” Myer says.
The process moved in fits and starts as Myer had to fit all the rigorous postproduction work in between his advertising gigs. When he was finally finished prepping the black-and-white images, Myer handed the project off to Kerry Leimer of the Seattle design firm Leimer Cross.
Charged with bringing the interactive Web elements into play, Leimer says the scripting was much more labor intensive than the actual layout and design. The end result is a 4 x 5 grid system that loads fast and switches panels out almost instantaneously on high-speed Internet connections.
Most photographers Web sites lack clarity, Leimer says, adding that they’re often too esoteric and generally suffer from the “I’m a star syndrome.“ I’ve seen a lot of Web sites by photographers with silly things like mottos and poems and interactive games – nonsense that doesn’t have anything to do with clients.”
In his work for Myer, Leimer strove for a clear communication of the idea, without the fancy bells and whistles that can bog down a site and scare off users. “We basically just executed something he found was working well in his portfolio,” he says.
Though he has finally completed an idea that germinated more than eight years ago, Myer is not ready to move on just yet. He recently added a slide show and a random face generator, and he’s already thinking of new ways to extend the project, such as shooting in color and possibly using a medium-format digital camera. When asked to explain the significance of the "Stereotypes” project, Myer demurred. “I don’t like it when photographers or artists try to explain too much, I just like the fact that it works.”
|
