Brendan Earley

b. 1971, Ireland

These heads are portraits of my friends, created using software called Photofit, which is used by the police to recreate the face of a criminal as seen by their victim. The images are constructed from a database of thousands of recorded faces, generalised into different eye types, nose types, etc.

I sit down with a police officer and describe the face from memory, usually starting with the eyes, and then going on to each feature until the face is built up. After that it takes time to work out the shape of the face to get a closer resemblance to the person. These stark and somewhat unsettling images are rendered with varying degrees of faithfulness. They are rife with distortions, mostly arising from the limitations of the computer’s promise of perfectibility. Rather than having been scanned and tweaked, as one is accustomed to seeing, they are ‘drawn’ from scratch in a classic photo-real manner.

I will distribute these images around the city, wrapping them around telephone poles, traffic lights and streetlights – reintroducing the images back into the public domain.

(Text: heroes + holies catalogue, 2002)