Thorsten Schmidtkord’s Head on Top has really turned photography on its head.
The German portrait photographer has created these images using photo manipulation software to swap the chin of his subjects with the top of their heads. The result: a right load of weirdy beardys.
Once we’d got over the initial shock (and inevitable giggles) it’s pretty clear that, intentionally or not, Schmidtkord’s work actually poses many pertinent questions about creativity and originality in a digital age:
- Should heavily doctored images such as these really be celebrated as art?
- What do these images say about the difficulty of expressing one’s natural creativity in a world where computers can do so much of the hard work for us?
- Like the images, are our individual expressions lost in cyberspace as we compete with thousands of tweets per second in the fight to get our own voices heard?
Whichever way you look at Head on Top Schmidtkord’s work will leave you speechless, just like the faces staring back at you. Or has it? What do you think, can we really be creative and original in a digital age?