“Average Faces From Around The World”
Finding the average face of people across the world was a tough job but someone had to do it. This guy basically takes a thousands and thousands images of everyday people from any city and the software makes an ‘average’ of the people, giving one final portrait. Take a look at this amazing project called “World of Facial Averages.”
For full article, click here.
Does anybody else notice how beautiful every single one of these people are?
Some of you may remember my post about how race is a social construct. http://terracanta.tumblr.com/post/11206404531/guavi-fuckyeahgladosandchell-something-that
What this person has done is exactly what I mean about how we imagine a ‘Typical image’ of certain ‘races’. He has made an ‘Average’ composite of faces from each of these regions using a software program.
I have many issues with this. First of all, this ignores the range of variation in individuals by ‘combining’ them into what is considered ‘standard’. Second, he uses political boundaries as a means to define ethnicity and phenotypic features. Third, he basically just took pictures off of the internet of people who met a certain search term. I have included a quote from him below:
“I used this site:http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average
I used no one I thought was under 20 and no one I thought was over 50. I used any internet source I could to get about 15-20 pictures each composite. The hardest thing is finding that many pictures of good frontal shots. Most people take pictures at an angle.
It is also not always easy to find pictures of every nationality. At times I would use Google Image and type in the 10 most common last names for a nationality. For Latin America, where names are shared, I would use the most common last names for that country and put the country name in the search. I would try to verify that the person is at least in that country or from it (not easy). That was especially tricky with the UK (English, Welsh, etc) and Irish.
Strangely for some nationalities it was easier to find men than women or vice versa. For example, very easy to find pictures of Italian men, but not women. It is very easy to find pictures of French women, but not men, etc.
Anyway, for every composite I think I viewed at least a couple of thousand photos”
My issue with this is that, even though he looked through thousands of photos, in the end, HE ultimately decided who would be part of the composite and who would not. Despite the multitude of portraits on the internet, there are billions more who do not have a photo online and would never be represented in these photos.
Just like fictional characters, none of these people actually exist and claiming that they are an “Average” face is misleading and false. No one facial image can ever represent an “average face”. Much like drawing, photography is also subjected to our interpretations and biases.
I know I rant a lot, but this is a social issue that far too many people take for granted and projects like this only contribute to our biases.
(Source: blahblahblasphemy, via pablobanila)
