The images below are the beginnings of an experiment. I've always found it interesting how much the right and left sides of people's faces can differ. One might suppose the difference is related to the left brain / right brain dichotomy. The left brain is supposed to control logical, objective, analytic thinking, while the right brain governs the intuitive, subjective, and wholistic. (The left brain would be expressed on the right side of the face and vice versa.)
For this experiment I pulled images of faces off the web and duplicated and divided them in such a way as to create three faces: one, on the viewers left, that is made up only of the right half of the subject's face and another, on the viewer's right, that is made up only of the left half of the subject's face. The original image appears in the middle.
To minimize environmental distortions, the image would ideally be straight on with even, consistent lighting.One of thing I've discovered is that such photos are damned near impossible to find, and slight variations in angle and lighting become magnified in the process I'm using. I hope something of interest remains. Let me know if you would like to see this continue with some more examples.
Gwyneth Paltrow (symmetrical face)
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Dick Cheney
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Eleanor Roosevelt
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Tim Gunn
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Sarah Jessica Parker
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Tony Blair
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Billie Holiday
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Robert Deniro
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Robert Deniro (Same image as above, a little cropped, but using a morphing technique. In this case the original image, at left below, is duplicated and mirrored, and then the two images are morphed together to create the center image. Thanks to a reader to be named later -- because my blog is down today with a server error -- for recommending this technique. It creates a more realistic image, but one that elides the differences between the hemispheres rather than exaggerating them as above. It creates a "normalized" face rather than a caricature.) |
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| Bob Dylan |
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Andre Breton |
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Johnny Depp |
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home | © Thomas Christensen, 2006