Text Portraits - Ralph Ueltzhoeffer

From the beginning of my project I have developed along the concept or portraits and in particular, wanting to focus around photography. One day whilst researching for ideas and influences one of my classmates discovered a piece of work that looked amazing. I instantly was amazed by it and knew that I had just found my focus for my Art Work. The work was by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer, the producer of one of the first text portraits like the example below.

Ueltzhoeffer, R (2002) David Beckham Portrait. [Digital Image]

The above image uses a story of details of David Beckham, perhaps from a Wikipedia entry, and then uses the text gathered to produce a portrait image of David. The way this is achieved is by the text adjusting colour to change with the contours and details of the subjects face. Here is a collection of other work by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer.

Ueltzhoeffer, R (2009) Celebrity Portraits. [Digital Images]

As you can see they all follow the same design of relevant text forming a portrait of the celebrity. The whole series of work plays around with the idea of identity and the documents of word that are created around us create who we are: our credit rating, job title, name, place of birth. They all arguably form more of your identity than your own face.

Here is some more information about Ueltzhoeffer's project from his project website, http://text-portrait.ueltzhoeffer.com/about/.

Text portrait – a symbiosis out of text and photo, biography and portrait (PHOTO).

A portrait is a painting, a photo, a sculpture or another artistic display of a person. The intension of a portrait is, next to the display of the physical similarity, is also to express the character, respectively the personality of the portrayed person.
If you now extend the basic requirements of a portrait by the name, the biography, the finger print, an iris scan or the DNA, the portrayed person becomes more and more recognized without a doubt among a multitude of people. Therefore, the society can easily respond the needs of an individual.
A text portrait can start off with the NAME, the BIOGRAPHY or the PHOTO. Only the combination (symbiosis) of the single components form it to a text portrait.

Text portrait – what is that?

A text portrait is a version of lettering and photo of a usual portrait, with the difference, that the text (e.g. biography) and the photo (e.g. passport picture) create an inseparable symbiosis. The fusion of two visually different components to a readable portrait – the text portrait.

References:
Ueltzhoeffer, R (2009) Text Portrait Project. Available at http://text-portrait.ueltzhoeffer.com/about/ [Accessed 18/11/2010]