This Person Does Not Exist

2022

This Person Does Not Exist sets out to question the truth value we grant to photographs, drawing in part on the work of Joan Fontcuberta and on the conceptual apparatus introduced by William J.T. Mitchell, in particular his notion of the metapicture.

For this project I downloaded more than two thousand images from thispersondoesnotexist.com and, by means of an algorithm, reconstructed the image of a person who does exist — myself — using as pixels the portraits of people generated by a generative adversarial network (GAN).

The work asks the viewer to consider how much truth we still attribute to images, and how, in an increasingly technological world, images may come to be created spontaneously by machines. The case of DALL·E 2 is a reminder of exactly that.

The complete image, a portrait composed of thousands of generated faces — The final image in full

A detail of the portrait, where individual faces start to become visible — Detail

A closer crop revealing the faces used as pixels — Closer in

A magnified view of the eye, where every pixel is the face of a person who does not exist — The eye

Credits

Thanks to Enrica Fenoglio for allowing me to use one of her photographs.
Thanks to Fabio Chiusano for writing the code used to produce the final image.
Theory of the Image course 2021/2022, taught by Sergio Giusti, CFP Bauer.