Face-mockers, Face-shifters, and Face swappers: Agency and Personal Identity in Portrait Photography Today
Creators: name: Peraica, Ana
name: Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference, Dark Eden
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: 190104 Visual Cultures
subject: FOS: Arts (arts, history of arts, performing arts, music)

description: Until recently, the idea of stealing someone’s face was unheard of outside the realm of cinematic and literary fiction. In films, the idea of stealing a face can include the idea of transferring a character from one subject to another. It may even involve the death of the original face owner. Most often, the protagonist of the movie is a plastic surgeon, a mediator of faces. One of the oldest movies featuring this character is Anthony Mann’s American film noir classic Strange Impersonation (1946). In this film, a woman scientist takes the face of a person blackmailing her. In Stolen Face by Terence Fisher (1952) plastic surgeon Dr. Phillip Ritter attaches the face of a beautiful piano player to the head of a prisoner, Lily Conover, strongly believing that the prisoner might become a better person if she was more visually appealing. Unfortunately, the prisoner doesn’t change, and she persists in committing crimes. In Eyes without a Face, by Georges Franju (1960), a girl named Christine’s face is been damaged in a car accident caused by her father, who is a plastic surgeon. The surgeon and his assistant kidnap a young woman who look like Christine and tries unsuccessfully to transplant her face onto his daughter’s head. In Teshigahara’s Japanese noir Face by Another (1966), based on the novel by Kōbō Abe, the protagonist also takes someone else’s face. Here, like in Fisher’s Stolen Face, the question is whether a person changes his or her own character when donning someone else’s face — that is, whether the face itself has the agency to change the underlying person. Sometimes, when a person's face is stolen, that person may die. After all, it is integrally related to the agency of another person. Or, the person who took the face may change his behavior. In both cases, this is called changing the personal identity.In the real world, facial surgeon Dr. Edward Lewison operated on several hundreds of prisoners on Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby, Canada to give them a fresh life.⁠1The idea that the quality of life will change with the change of face, especially if that face looks like someone who serves as a model of success or beauty, is feeding the industry of facial surgery. Among the most frequently “mocked” faces are those of fictional characters like Barbie and Ken (dolls), Jessica Rabbit (an animated character), or celebrities as Pamela Anderson, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Elvis Presley, David Beckham, Justin Bieber, Katie Price and Kim Kardashian. In addition, some companies use the faces of celebrities, without permission, in their Internet marketing campaigns. The result of these operations is the dismissal of agency in portraiture, in terms of specific and unique existence. As more people have the same face, it is hard to define who is the original and who is the copy using only visual analysis.With today’s emergent technology has, in a way, made it possible to steal faces in real life. Images of faces, or portraits, are frequently stolen for personal, public, commercial, machine education, and artistic purposes through such means as directly downloading them from image-sharing social networks, recording people without their consent, transferring rights to third-party applications… But what happens when a portrait is stolen in these new systems? While photographic identity theft can justly raise fears of misidentification and misuse of data, the generative photography can support fears of replacement. One resides in the claim that a portrait necessarily presents singular personal identity while the other it is irreplaceable while the other that personal identity cannot be exchanged with someone.