to identify

Facial recognition is a photographic visual poem constructed from a book, a pair of glasses, and a chess queen. Its frontal arrangement activates pareidolia: the observer recognizes a face where there are only objects.

The work starts from this perception to shift the reading of the image toward contemporary facial recognition systems. The human gaze attributes the appearance of a face to an inanimate composition, while algorithmic identification systems transform the human face into data, a pattern, and an object of classification.

The objects participate in this tension. The glasses frame the gaze, the book introduces the dimension of record, and the queen refers to power. In this way, the image articulates a relationship between observation, information, and power without explicitly representing any technological device.

The title adds another ambiguity. To recognize can mean to identify, but also to admit the existence and condition of someone. This difference is decisive in the realm of digital surveillance, since a person can be identified by a system without truly being recognized in their singularity. The apparent objectivity of technological classification then raises questions about privacy, equality, and guarantees against power.

With a deliberate formal economy, the work contrasts a human gaze, capable of recognizing a nonexistent subject among objects, with an algorithmic gaze, capable of reducing a real subject to processable information. The result is a face without a person facing a person turned into readable, comparable, and classifiable data.

• Typology: visual poem – conceptual work
• Procedure: digital photography
• Technique and materials: printing with pigmented inks on 100% cotton paper, matte finish, mounted on Dibond® aluminum with floating frame.
• Dimensions: 60 x 60 cm