Photobook Proposal

Strange Faces in Strange Places

My name is Thomas Keane and I am writing this proposal for my Understanding the Image module.  I am a first year Film Studies student at Dublin Business School. The photo assignment I am proposing is called Strange Faces in Strange Places. The basic premise of the project is the anthropomorphising of everyday objects and surroundings. I would like to explore the idea of seeing faces in every day surroundings on inanimate objects or in places where they shouldn't be. I got the idea when walking and I saw, what to me, looked like a face on the ground. In reality it is just two leaves and a mark left by a bicycle tyre. I felt it was strange that I immediately saw a sad face staring back at me and that was when I was struck by this idea to investigate how people will make a connection with a random assortment of things and transform it into an emoting human face.

 I will be taking photographs from now up until March, to be presented at a photography exhibition in Temple Bar, Dublin in April 2014. As this theme is not locked to a specific area it means that if I see a face somewhere I can take a picture anywhere at all. I will be, however, mainly looking for photo opportunities in the Dublin and bray areas as I live in Bray. I intend to shoot these pictures on my iPhone which again gives me another level of freedom to take pictures whenever I see them occur. I feel that because there are faces in everything around us, it will not be difficult to find my subject matter.  As long as my phone is fully charged, there is no limit to the amount or variety of photographs I should be able to take by March 2014, in time for the exhibition in April.

I am very interested in how people relate to their surroundings, be they man made or natural, and how people try to make connections with everything. We feel happy when, by chance, an item or a group of items happens to look like a face. Sometimes the products we buy have a vague resemblance to a face. There have been movies, books and various other forms of media devoted to the anthropomorphization of objects: Herbie, Christine, The Amityville Horror to name a few.  I would like to investigate this and I think this photo book assignment is the perfect excuse to explore this issue further.

I will view this investigation a success if the people looking at the pictures also identify faces in the photographs I have taken. The face should never have to be pointed out and be instantly recognizable. I feel to achieve this goal I must take clear concise photographs but I also intend to edit some of my pictures in Photoshop to make the face stand out that little bit more.

In Conclusion, the goal of this photo book is to see how people humanize their surroundings to understand them better and relate to the world around them, simply by seeing a smiling face in the foam in their coffee or a sad face made of leaves and tyre marks in the rain.