Issue 10 March 2011
Quantum
from African to Chinese to European to Indian; it was just going quicker and quicker, different faces changing, more and more quickly, and it became like a hologram. This hologram for me was a visualisation obviously, and a kind of voice that was talking to me. So I went out as a photographer to try and realise this image that I had had in my mind’s eye. I went to Google search and divided the world into different ethnic groups and got an average of the world’s population to make the face that was in my mind that day. It took me about a year or so to make it.
Q
Describe for us the process of deciding how many people to include, what types of people–the statistical aspect that went into getting the face of humanity so that it was really representative of the whole human population.
The Face of the Universal Male
Well, to make it as scientific as possible, I wanted to include everybody, so I had to make sure I took a lot of people, because the more people I took photos of, the broader my group average would be. So I decided to take one-ten-millionth of the world’s population. At that time there were about 6.7 billion of us. To make it manageable, and a bit poetic, I took off all the zeroes, which was 67, but that was too few people. And 6700 was too many. So I decided on 670, one-ten- millionth of the population. I divided them up into ethnic groups according to their proportion of the world’s population, which ended up being categorised regionally as well: 23% Far Eastern, 18% Indian, 15% African, 11% Middle Eastern, 9% Latin American, 8% South East Asian, 7% Northern European, 5% USA, and 4% East and Southern European. I wanted to make it as true and fair as I could to be representative of the world’s population.
The Face of the Universal Female
To photograph them, I focused on their eyes. The left eye, it is said, is the eye to the soul. So, I put a little spot inside the camera, on the mirror–when the photo is taken the mirror lifts up and the shutter opens, and when the shutter closes the mirror goes down again–so when people are actually looking through the lens they can see the little spot inside. I hold a light up that shines on it and they can see it. So when they focus on that and I take the photo, and the mirror goes up, they are focusing precisely on the pixel plane where the image is recorded. So to make the average face of humanity I wanted each person to focus on that spot, so there was similarity in the form of the portraits and I could more easily merge them.
The Face of Humanity
www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
I had to get the proportions of male and females in each group. It was pretty easy getting all the guys. But not so easy getting all the females. You know, almost a quarter of the population is
Quantum Health 9
HEALTH
Photo by: David Trood
Photo by: David Trood
Photo by: David Trood
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