The Picture Of Jason Haynes
The future threatens us with seamlessly switching faces in the digital realm. Whilst some are already at the mercy of underground copies, superimposed onto alien bodies, perhaps there will be a Creative Commons faces, or 'common faces' which people will share and compare, sold cheaply and used for all manner of politics and entertainment. These faces will be killed off multiple times. The face of a thousand others and others of a thousand faces.
In 2004 a James Dean poster from his 'Giant' period stood over me and her dormitory room when the comparison was made. This would be the pinnacle of my flattery mirrors. And most aren't that flattering. Looking back at the famous people I have been likened to I see it's the 'spirit' in as much as the physical properties. In my early 20's I am a contrapposto, cliché, blonde rebel-type, belonging to a long history of likewise characters. Whilst later examples broke this pattern; comparissons based merely on skin colour and nationality; like in 2010, when the artist Meschac Gaba said I was 'Harry Potter' (who I've no objective resemblance to whatsoever). But I didn't revert to comparing him to any common denominators from his native Country. And not because I was more politically correct, far from it. But because my exposure to Beninise culture was so minimal that I couldn't even navigate any intentionally correct or incorrect comparison. You could argue that all this was grand old lazy racial stereotyping in which the Hegelian Incel is merely being expressed through the embodiment of modern celebrity. And that another 700 words or so on this well trodden topic from a non-expert would be tiresome. And you would be right. But this is not about that and this is no diatribe, so give me a chance to take it further... In 1998 I was Beckham because it was England and it was blonde curtains and I was pretty. But then there were the comparisons to Soap actors and the reality TV stars, perceived as disposable discount versions of singers and Hollywood actors (who are mostly perceived as fragmented versions of their mythical on-screen personas). To later compare me to these third division celebrities was to acknowledge my low wrung value within the image commodity as the knock-off market-stall version that I really am. And if the doppelgänger is presented as an exciting existential threat then making any comparisons can only be a more terrifying form of valuation. Even so, these phoney doubles were rarely intended as weapons against me, I have always been fortunate there. They serve as records of popular culture at the time, a shared consciousness of iconographies translated through shared brush strokes of expression, mistaken for replication. (A stranger in the street barking at me; 'Oyyy, Pete Doherty!' in 2005 because I wore a trilby. 'Nice skinnies mate'). I am wearing a trilby in 2005 because it is a particular accessible expression of the time, which I had regurgitated, but which happened to be imprisimed to one identifiable person greater than myself. Over three decades there are some traces of physical correlations, of course. The quiff became follically less endowed and with that Dean became Jude Law, a turning point that reflected a season in my life when I lost weight too. There is the straight nose with a bottom button supratip and my sometimes gormless looking cheeky smile, folded at the ends by a delicately drooping oral commissure; morphologising some wild connecting references in one year: Calvin Johnson of the band Beat Happening + Emmanuelle Béart in Manon Of The Spring + the drummer of Supertramp.... To draw a boundary around their mouth and cut it out, then place it over mine. I am all and none incompletely. Transluscent masks of others shaping my own. In 2015-16 I had no references. Was I not expressing I or was I = I? I haven't changed very much in appearance over the past 10 years and yet those I was compared with in the past have never been compared to me again; neither their past or present versions. They 'trans' through me at a moment in time, which is to say that these fictional and famous faces are another dimension of my changing ego in a similar way as when we look at old photos of ourselves and see a familiar stranger looking back. Still, I never chose to trust these comparisons. The face gets colonised by the outside environment and looks in the mirror with a degree of estrangement and indifference. The passport photo, the school photo, the wedding photo, the mug shot all reflect the authority and reliance on that sensory visual organ that comes to define us in the singular. But we are all other versions of another. I am a projection of them just as they are of me. My copies are still deviations of me even if they hold greater power of recognition. One thing we all share is the familiar strangeness of being, merely captured inside a mirror for prosperity. As the saying goes, you cannot smell your own nose. And the nose can't be seen by our own trusted eyes alone. But perhaps this is the mischievous intention of the face. Below: my photographic archive of comparisons and their attributors... |
'Kevin' 1995 family
'Ryan' 2003 colleague
Pete Doherty 2005 stranger
Calvin Johnson 2007
'Gigi' 2009 girlfriend
Gustav Klimt 2012 friend
Homer 2018 girlfriend
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David Beckham 1998 school
James Dean 2004
Jason Cowen 2005 friend
'Manon' 2008 friend
'Jay' 2010 associate
Jude Law 2014 associate
Jimmy Fallon 2018 colleague
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'David Platt' 2001 family
Bryan Adams 2005 friend
'Andrew Clark' 2007 friend
Bob Seibenberg 2008 friend
'Mikey Waters' 2010 confirmed by friend
'Jeremy' 2014 cousin
Unknown DJ 2018 guy in Chinese club
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Rod Stewart 2002 school
James Bourne 2005
'Dirk Digler' 2007 friend
Jon Bon Jovi 2009 piss-taker
'Harry Potter' 2011 artist
'Poprishchin' image 2017 friend
Meg Ryan 2018 girlfriend
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2017-18