アリ・サロモン

Ari Salomon

This exhibition is on display at the “Face House” in Kyoto. Designed 50 years ago by Kazumasa Yamashita, the building itself serves as an embodiment of the joy found in making faces out of everyday objects.

This series investigates the humanness that can be found in mechanical objects. With a fresh perspective, the images uncover anthropomorphic qualities, as if fresh eyes are winking back from unexpected places. This series also investigates the mechanical nature of human perception. Pareidolia is the scientific term for the brain’s process of finding significance in vague or random stimuli—finding animals in clouds is a common example. Carl Sagan hypothesized that human beings are “hard-wired” via early evolution to identify the human face as a survival technique.

How can photography make the invisible visible? In this case, the part of our brain that unconsciously strains to find a face and, by the same token, the matching part of the industrial designers’ brain that guided them to unconsciously design an object with a face in it. These objects are a reflection of the people that anonymously build the cities around us; that anonymously roam the cities around us.

Presenting many images allows the viewer to strengthen their skill at face recognition as if it is a kind of perceptive muscle. You may find that you start to see these faces everywhere, and perhaps also be aware of other processes of perception.