UNSPEAKING LIKENESS

While taking photographs of pathology specimens in the Mutter Museum, a Philadelphia-based institution dedicated to medical arts and history, I came across an intriguing object: a sculpture of a woman’s head replete with eyeglasses and a brown, wavy wig. It was resting on its side on a storage room shelf between an ancient microscope and the dried leg of a horse. She had the look of the utterly lost, and certainly seemed an abandoned anomaly in this storage room filled with historical medical ephemera. I carried the head to the museum director and was told that it was a forensic facial reconstruction sculpture.

In short, sculptures such as these, usually constructed of clay or plaster, are commissioned by various law enforcement agencies and used to establish the identity of victims of suspected violent crime whose soft tissue facial features have been obliterated by either trauma or the passage of time.

Intrigued, I embarked upon a five-year quest across the US and Mexico seeking out and photographing more such reconstructions, resulting in the Unspeaking Likeness series and book of the same title.

From the beginning, my goal for this project was to humanize the reconstructions but not necessarily transpose them to the realm of reality. The photographs are obviously images of static sculptures; I am attempting to encourage the viewer, by how I photograph the work and how I present it, to see the reconstructions as potentially human, rather than as faces of clay. To this end my point of focus was always the eyes; I left the rest of the face to fall out of focus so as to better speak of the anonymity of the victim and the malleability of their existence.

Along with being exhibited in museums and galleries, images from Unspeaking Likeness were used by Mexican law enforcement agencies in the aid of identifying the victims pictured. Tens of thousands of reproductions of the faces were posted in places such as WalMart, resulting in the identification of two women whose bodies had been found in a mass grave outside of Ciudad Juarez.