The Family of Man project

Another international photographic experiment by photographer David Trood

This photo project is to find THE image that will resemble the average face of the human race:

dansk version tryk her

 

The image above is just the beginning of the project, and is compiled only of the first 12 people out of two hundred that I need to photograph with my iphone. Each and every person is looking directly into the the eye of the iphone camera with their mouth closed and smiling.

 

The first twelve people

Will it resemble the original Face of Humanity from the book At Any Given Moment?

 

I am curious to see if this new portrait will look like the portrait on the cover of the book, even if I photograph other people.

The eyedea is to make one single portrait by taking two hundred portraits of different people and then merging them together with the help of the computer, making sure that each set of eyes appears the same place on the image. Merged together into the final single image will be 100 different men and 100 different women such as the demographic population of the world is today (eg. 23% Far Eastern, 18% Indian, 15% African, 5% USA and so on - see the average ethnic percentages below).

 

(read more about the book by pressing the photo below)

 

I want to find out if this next image will have the same face, so I am doing it again. This time I am just using my iphone.

 

According to the demographics of the human population at the moment,

23% of the people should be from the Far East,

18% from India,

15% from Africa,

11% from the Middel East,

9% from Latin America

8% from South East Asia

7% from Northern Europe

5% from U.S.A

4% from Southern & Eastern Europe

50% women

50% men

Follow the progress and result here "the iphone/facebook Face of Humanity"

Every portrait will be loaded up into my album on facebook as I take them. The final result will be shown in that same album as it progresses. By merging the portrait photos of 100 men and 100 women, we should see the face which is the average of the whole human race! And I really think it will look like the first face, the one from the book. The only difference is that it will look like it´s taken with my iphone.

Watch the space ;-)

 

Why am I doing it?

I am doing it because it is the most interesting thing I have ever stumbled upon in the twenty years of being a photographer. It´s also the perfect image to help bring focus to International Eye Contact Day, on the 20th March, 2012.

 

Read more about the Face of Humanity and see how I made it in the book. Below are a few of the pages from At Any Given Moment.