DOPPELGANGER. Images of the Human Being (wkrótce w sprzedaży)

Doppelganger presents current trends in capturing the visual identity of human beings. Each of its seven chapters explores a different creative approach: Embody, Dissolve, Appeal, Reshape, Perform, Deform, and Escape. The book is a compelling and entertaining collection of groundbreaking permutations of the outer human shell created with costumes and masks as well as photo-technical and artistic manipulation. While inventing, enhancing, obscuring, or altering identities, the images play with and often obliterate classical proportions and visual traditions. In doing so, they reveal further possibilities for what can be considered beautiful and fashionable.

The digital age has fundamentally changed traditional notions of who we are and how we wish to be perceived. The music producer Chris Walla puts it this way: “Confronted with our significantly more banal everyday life, we’re measuring our actual selves against our online selves with hopeful resignation.”

Doppelganger presents current trends in the depiction of human beings. In today’s images and sculptures, personal identities are being intensified, altered, or created through the use of techniques such as deformation and construction/deconstruction as well as the obliteration of classical proportions, visual traditions, and what is generally considered beautiful and fashionable.

The book shows permutations of the outer human shell created with costumes and masks as well as photo-technical and artistic manipulation. These take their visual cues from such diverse aesthetics as Dada, surrealism, high tech, cutting-edge fashion design, and the folklore of other cultures. Masquerades and artificial characters are used imaginatively to enhance and obscure true identities.

With examples ranging from the intimate to the radical, Doppelganger explores how many or how few effects the depiction of a person can take in order to function as such. In doing so, the book shows that the unique visual appearances being created today often reveal more about the identities of their subjects and creators than their “real” faces ever could.