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Music

Faceless Shows Faces Betrayed By Music

French artist Jefta turns the act of listening intently into creepy, disfigured masks.

Music is without doubt a personal preference. Not only is one man’s dubstep another man’s faulty subwoofer, but its transportive effects can invoke memories and feelings from specific times and places in someone’s life. French artist Jefta—whose previous projects have explored the movement of the human body using software programs—investigates the relationship between music and the individual in his series Faceless.

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For his project, he either asks a person to pick a song they find emotionally moving, or he assigns one arbitrarily to them. Subjects then stand before the camera for the duration of the song, while a long exposure shoots them listening intently. As long as they don’t leave the frame, they can move or shake their heads while Jefta records their reaction to the music, whether that be indifference or excitement or whatever. Ultimately, the project captures the expressions we unknowingly reveal.

He then posts a montage of three images of the person that mutate from his or her initial stationary position to shots that are “unrecognizable, leading to a disfigured mask. The face loses its singularity to become a collective shapeless mass.”

@stewart23rd