Robert Frank’s The Americans is one of the most iconic photographic projects of the 20th century. Published in the late 1950s the photographic compendium offered a fresh, authentic perspective on class, race and everyday life on the street. This classic project was the starting point for Toronto-based artist Dafydd Hughes’ Every Face in the Americans, which saw him ‘feed’ Frank’s collection of photographs to iPhoto’s facial recognition algorithm to recontextualize the work as the basis of a web archive and a print on demand book.
Hughes’ project was executed as his (2012) MFA thesis work within Ryerson’s Documentary Media program. He didn’t set out to interrogate either The Americans or iPhoto’s use of facial recognition and arrived at his project quite serendipitously. He’s quite earnest about the happy accident that led to this work: “I’d added scans of The Americans to iPhoto so I could easily experiment with sequencing, but I discovered these faces when I was looking for very small images to test a very slow script I was working on that sorted pixels according to various parameters”. Having stumbled into “the deep end” of the iPhoto library, his curiosity had been piqued. In isolating faces, the software often cropped out the street scene that made many of these images so famous, or perhaps changed the subject of a photograph to someone that had been milling about in the background. Hughes describes some of the more socioculturally loaded implications of handing over this half-century old material to a stock algorithm in his project statement:
Sometimes the patterns of light and dark are just right. iPhoto will find almost every face in a picture: Those five people sitting on a trolley, looking out at the photographer. Of course, there’s no way for the program to know it’s the southern USA in the 1950s and all the white people are supposed to be at the front; iPhoto sorts them in the order it found them; it abolishes segregation. Fifty years later, and no longer on the trolley but instead inside your computer, maybe these people can finally all sit where they want.
In contextualizing the cropping, Hughes points to Joan Fontcuberta’s claim that we now think of “pictures as trophies” and our reliance on tools like Facebook, Picasa and smartphones for managing our burgeoning photo libraries. “I get the feeling that faces are like nouns—they’re the basic enumerable units of content,” he summarizes. In order to make collections more manageable, iPhoto indifferently distills whatever material it is provided – Every Face in the Americans invites the viewer to contemplate the failures and omissions that occur during this process.
Every Face in the Americans, web photo-browser
When asked if he feels the project challenges the conventions of documentary, Hughes gets meta: “Superficially this is more of a piece about documentary than it is a documentary project itself.” This position is no cop-out, the rules of engagement have changed tremendously in the last decade and the volume of photographs we now traffic in is overwhelming; flickr now offers a terabyte of free photo storage and its 54 pixel marketing copy boasts that I can archive my 537, 731 most treasured photographs on their service. Hughes sees this torrent of media as “turning us all into unwitting documentary photographers, as the software tags, sorts and categorizes—it helps us to build a narrative out of these images we’re collecting.”
