Our Faces, Our Selves
Self portraits via the police Identi-Kit
by Giles Revell, Matt Willey and Matthew McKinnon
Michael Williams-Stark, Musician/Voice actor:
At the time of my birth, nobody gave me a trophy, but I was told I was the most severe cleft lip and palate case in British Columbia. I've lost count, but I've had around thirteen or fourteen surgeries. One can't be this handsome by nature. It takes a team of surgeons to build a beauty like this.
You learn very early on that the world can be a tough place when you have a facial disfigurement. People would drive by and scream things at me out of cars when I was three or four. I went home and asked my mom how come people were always yelling things at me. I can remember her lifting me up and holding me up to the medicine cabinet mirror and saying, "Well, here's where you're different than other people. You were born this way. Here's what happened." It didn't bother me much then. But as I became more of a social creature and went to school, or anytime I'd participate in anything new, there was some hurdle I'd have to jump over. I remember going to buy the latest Beatles album or something, and on my way up to Woodward's I'd consciously pick the route where I would run into the fewest human beings so I wouldn't get harassed. To have that kind of stress placed upon those little shoulders is a lot. You become world weary.
Once I taught my first workshop, I just knew. It was like being kissed by God. I got to use all the things I did for a living and combine them with my childhood to come up with this program, Making Faces. I knew right away that improv was a perfect tool, because to get through life you have to make eye contact and use your voice, and that's very difficult for people with a facial difference.
The use of composite drawings based on eyewitness accounts for identifying criminals has its origins in the nineteenth century, but the first commercially available system — one not dependent upon the skills of trained forensic artists — was Identi-Kit, introduced by the Townsend Corporation in the US in 1959.
The original Identi-Kit consisted of a series of transparent cards, or foils, on which different types of facial features and accessories were drawn, arranged in a simple wooden box. To assemble a likeness to descriptions provided by witnesses, a police officer or witness would have a broad variety of eyes, noses, lips, ears, foreheads, jaws, and so forth to mix and match, one on top of the other. After the system was purchased in the late 1960s by the legendary gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson, a new version of Identi-Kit emerged that used photographic foils to render the choice of features more precise and realistic. More recently, mechanical composite drawing kits like Identi-Kit have been replaced by specially designed software.
The version of Identi-Kit used in the current project has photographic foils and was used by the rcmp beginning in 1976. The severe limitations of this method of creating composites for identifying criminals is evident. The forty or so types of each individual feature in the kit have little hope of reflecting the infinite nuances of the human face, and indeed research suggests that Identi-Kit makes it more difficult for witnesses to identify criminals. (Today the
rcmp relies on sketches by trained forensic artists.) But when applied to oneself in the form of a self-portrait, it can be revealing of the way a person sees his or her self and appearance.
BONUS: View five more Identi-Kit portraits in our
online-only gallery.
Twelve Canadians were photographed, asked to construct self-portraits using Identi-Kit, and then interviewed about their experiences of the process and themselves. The result is a study in the complexity and conflictedness of identity, of the subtle disjunctions between how we look from the outside and how we think of ourselves from the inside.
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Francesco Sinibaldi: An evidence for you.
When everything
shines in the
light of October
there's a beautiful
seaside, and a
careful watcher: the
sun fades away,
and even a
strange man
arrives near a
fountain.
Francesco Sinibaldi September 20, 2008 12:29 EST