Three Variations on the Face and the Void

Rome, April 2021

In recent days my attention has been captured by something that, albeit in different areas and types, has led me to reflect on a single theme.

Three variations on the face and its link with emptiness, even if this concept is extremely ambiguous and fluctuating.

First case: “The thief of grave photos”

It's recent news, in the chronicle of Rome, that a certain Marco C., a former electrician from Portonaccio, an area of the city, was indicted for his disturbing obsession with stealing images from tombs in cemeteries.

Apparently, the first time was in 1994, where he saw the photograph of a beautiful girl on the tombstone in the Verano cemetery and stole it.

Since then he has not been able to stop until the man was charged with the theft of 358 images, all pretty women, and die young.

They called him the “photo-stealing necrophile”.

“I started in 1994”, says the man under investigation, “taking, for reasons that I don't know how to specify, a photo from a tombstone in Verano. After the first theft, I developed a real addiction. I couldn't stop anymore. I kept the most beautiful on display, with frames. They were sacred to me. I hid others so as not to show too many.”

Not only did he steal them, uprooting them from the tombstones, but he also bought photo-ceramics.

His bedroom is described as a kind of cemetery; he also wrote in a diary the day of the theft and the data of the deceased women in the photographs:

“May 5, 2020, taken by Licia P., who died in 65 at the age of thirty.”

Really disturbing.

Obviously, every lover of photography, and who has already read my blog, immediately comes to mind Ferdinando Scianna's anecdote about the origins of love for photography. That of the father who photographed dead people for the images of the tombstones, so that the people in the village made fun of him saying that he raised the dead, and Ferdinand instead “killed the living”.

A good psychologist would enjoy a macabre perversion like that of this Marco C.

I was also intrigued by it.

Usually “necrophile” refers to the perversion in which sexual attraction is felt towards corpses of the opposite sex.

But in this case, the amorous attraction (philia) is more for the image.

I don't dare go into who knows what labyrinths and emotional past of a person like this, but as a photographer and portraitist I can only stop and think about what could have taken place in the mind of this sick person.

He certainly will have serious problems relating to the other sex; I don't think he's married or even engaged.

Perhaps he has a radical conflictual, if not traumatic, relationship with the women alive, so the only emotional and affective fulfillment he obtains from images of women who are no longer there.

Those faces that have disappeared are much more real to him than the women he meets every day and perhaps completely ignores (and they ignore him).

“They were sacred to me,” he says. Like religious icons.

A sick devotion to beauty, youth, absence.

I don't think the emphasis is on death, indeed I believe that the definition of necrophile is wrong. It's more of an icon-philia.

It is the image (icon) of the void that he loves.

The sacredness of absence which is more alive than the real and daily image that surrounds him – and certainly hurts him.

A dark and perverse shade of the power that portraits can have on people's minds.

I remember the tribes, but also many animist and Muslim people who refuse to be photographed precisely for the fear that their soul will be kidnapped by the camera.

Only God can reproduce the human being, we cannot stain ourselves with such pride.

In all this falls the abyss of this man, in which the love for the emptiness of death enclosed in an unknown face manages to fill the emptiness of his soul.

Second case: “The emptiness behind the faces”.

I happened to read about a website and an app called “This Person Does Not Exist”, where each click automatically generates a different face (and background).

In February 2019, Uber engineer Phillip Wang created this website which, using StyleGAN, offers visitors photos of people who don't exist. StyleGAN is a type of generative adversarial network (GAN) developed by NVIDIA and distributed open-source as of February 4, 2019.

As they explain on Inverse, every single photo on the site was created using a particular type of artificial intelligence algorithm, the aforementioned GAN.

“I have decided to dig into my own pockets and raise some public awareness for this technology,” the creator wrote. “Faces are most salient to our cognition, so I’ve decided to put that specific pre-trained model up. Each time you refresh the site, the network will generate a new facial image from scratch from a 512-dimensional vector.”

The realism of those faces is impressive.

It seems to be in front of a slot machine, almost stimulating a sort of compulsive addiction to see what the next face will be.

I wondered what's the point.

Isn't it the same thing to leaf through any portrait photo book?

It is not that the faces portrayed, for example by Steve McCurry, we know who they are. Of course, we have the certainty that they are existing people. There is the caption, the place, the date. The certain existence of those who photographed them.

The intent of the creator of the site was to warn about all that is false circulating on the web. Attention – he seems to say – not only the news can be fake, but also the people, the faces we see, by the hundreds, every day on social networks, on information sites.

And he did it, not surprisingly, by choosing faces, because the face has always been the simulacrum of our identities.

From the animists cited above to the Lombrosian theories on the correlation between facial physiognomy and the character of the person.

It looks like a game. A mental play of a computer genius.

But it became a case and other similar programs were created in the wake: two faculties of the Information School of the University of Washington used the algorithm to create “Which Face is Real?”, which challenges users to distinguish between a real face and a fake one placed side by side.

We have arrived at zero degrees of the human face. No longer the simulacrum of our identities and existences, but a surface that reveals absolute emptiness.

Something that goes beyond the human pride of iconographically reproducing the human being, a task that was once the prerogative of God alone.

We are now capable of creating a humanity that does not exist. And not as it has done for centuries, and always will do, poetry, literature, inventing stories and people that existed only in the minds of its creators; but in the focal point of human cognition: the face.

The child who looks at his face in the mirror for the first time and recognizes himself giving rise to the psychic evolution of his existence will now be able to observe something that is a pure illusion.

Third case: “The face as salvation”.

Vann Nath is one of seven survivors of the fourteen thousand people tortured and killed in the S-21 Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia during the Pol Pot dictatorship. His story is told in his beautiful book “The Painter of the Khmer Rouge – Memoir” by Add Publisher.

This genocide, which went down in history as the Year Zero, was told in many ways, both in the books and in the photographs of the photo-reporters of those years. The criminal madness of the dictator led him to exterminate a third of his own population: he wanted to create the New Man by canceling the existence of those who, in his eyes, represented the past.

The stories of the survivors are terrible.

Vann Nath was a painter.

In the prisons the soldiers had a list of the people incarcerated and, next to those names, it was written: “destroy”. But next to his name they wrote: “keep and use”. Because in the vanity of the torturers his art was seen as a way of self-celebration.

He was tasked with continually portraying Pol Pot, the commanders of the prisons, plus all the atrocious tortures and murders that were being committed.

All the prisoners were photographed and their head measurements were taken and then blindfolded and tied with a rope around their neck.

What he saw in those years was terrible. And he had to represent it.

He had to paint the face of the most hated man in his nation.

When the regime fell and Pol Pot died, in 1998, alone in the middle of a jungle, Vann Vath's first feeling was anger at not being able to see him in a courtroom, to pay for all the crimes committed in over twenty years. Karma had made him die alone, burned without a bonze there to bless him, but the anger was too much.

Now everyone else had to pay. But how to testify to the court of those crimes?

Thanks to his paintings. To the portraits of him.

Those were used as evidence, and he was one of the crucial witnesses in condemning the Khmer Rouge.

What a joke!

The portrayal of the power during the regime became proof of their guilt.

His paintings are real nightmares that can never be forgotten again. A few times portraits had a double and terrible history, similar to a Greek tragedy, like those painted by Vann Vath.

But the sense of revenge that emanates from this story becomes a kind of medicine for the wound.

The vanity that punishes itself.

The art used by tyranny becomes a means of justice.

The portrait as a nemesis.

A brushstroke to fill the moral void of faces without any soul and pity. 

“This Person Does Not Exist”

Italian version