Ed STASTNY - Composite Portraits

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Composites are what I call my cubist collage portraits. Using a series of digital images shot with webcam, phonecam or videocam, I create a disjunct portrait of a person. On this page you'll find images, information and links to resources I use in the creation of these portraits.

Things to See

Composite Gallery A collection of finished still portraits.
Video Composites Video of composites in flux, being built and built again.
Composite Builder Alpha Interactive composite builder, in Flash.
Interactive video composite A living breathing composite built of overlapping video loops. Click, mouse over, drag, watch. It is about 2.1Mb and requires Flash6 plug-in.

What Are Composites?

The composites I'm doing are single large images created from many, generally low-resolution, still images. Sources of images range from cellphone photos and web-cam stills to video capture and toy cameras.

The results are portraits that are often surreal, evoking influences of and parallels to David Hockney's landscapes, Picasso's cubism and Mark Ryden's distinctive faces.

Why?

For fun. By microphotographing people macroconstructing them again, I'm essentially at "play". These are experiments and exercises. It's interesting for me to see how familiar beautiful shapes can be resequenced and displayed. I like to think of these images as panoramas built via microscope. Does examining the subject at extreme proximity, isolating single curves or hollows or scars, give me more information or merely distort my view of the whole?

It's an interesting phenomenon, to be so close to something that you lose context. That's how we all exist, too close to see the big picture. The mind can not fully understand itself.

How?

Division of Head The technique is relatively simple "digital collage". Using a number of photographs of the subject's face and, on occasion, body, I create a layered collage. The first step is gathering the images. Some people think I simply use existing photographs of the subject. This is wrong. The gathering of images is part of the process. Shooting all of the images in the same setting with the same camera guarantees a certain level of color and lighting continuity. Anyone who has worked with web-cams long enough knows how finnicky they are with available light and color depth. I love to use the "weakness" of the camera to my advantage, especially the "grain" of compressed images and the occasional blurred-motion image.

Images can be gathered during a live videochat session with the subject, a live videoshoot in my studio or by the subject themself "offline". Once the images are gathered, I then assemble the shots into a "clip sheet", a single image that acts as my "palette" for creating the final composite. I then use image editing software (Photoshop) to copy pieces of the images from the "clip sheet" to the growing final image.