Show Your Face – Images by David Zentz
Last month I did a series of portraits on the front patio at Hotel Erwin during the Venice Art Crawl. The idea was to create a participatory art piece that people could be a part of making and then come back and see displayed the following month. I’m a big fan of close-up portraits, such as those done by Martin Schoeller, that focus only on the subjects’ faces, particularly the eyes. You can tell so much about someone’s character by studying their face up close and I wanted to do my own take on the concept. The Art Crawl seemed like the perfect forum, as I knew there would be a large number of people passing through and surely some of them would be willing to sit for me. I had more than 100 participants over the course of the night! In order to keep the images spontaneous and also handle the volume of people, I shot only three or four frames per person and gave very little instruction other than ‘do whatever you want.’ I thought it would be interesting to see how people reacted. The results were great, showing a wide variety of expressions, including silly, straightforward, engaged and distant. Over the next month I narrowed the edit down to 1 per person and spent a fair number of hours individually toning and sharpening the images so they’d each be uniform and pop off the paper or screen.
Last night I displayed the results back in the same space where I shot them and was happy to see a number of the participants return to check out the results. All of the images were projected on a screen in a continually looping slideshow and 33 were printed and hung on a curved chain curtain that’s proven to be a great space for hanging art. Thanks to everyone who participated! If you’re interested in purchasing a reprint of your photo you can click on the slideshow above. If you know you were one of the images I included in the print show you can contact me at dz@davidzentz.com to purchase your print. Below is a photo of the exhibit, in case you missed it.
