PROJECT 1v4

Fragmented Faces: The Distortion of Perception

In this extension of the Voices of Connection project, I delve deeper into the idea of how we perceive others-particularly those who are often marginalised or invisible in our daily lives. Building on the concept of distorted images from the LED matrix, I have taken photographs of individuals experiencing thier days on the streets and  have crudely broken their images down into individual features. These features-eyes, mouths, hair-have then been reassembled into entirely new, abstract faces. thousands of variations.

At first glance, these reassembled faces appear to represent real people. But as you look closer, something feels inherently off. The reason is that each face is made up of fragmented parts: the hair of one person, the eye of another, the mouth of a third. Sometimes the result looks male, sometimes female, and sometimes it’s impossible to tell. The goal is to force us to confront and examine these features in a way we rarely do with vulnerable individuals in real life.

We often see people living on the streets from a distance, without ever truly looking at them up close. In contrast, we marvel at the curated beauty of online personas, praising perfection in a way that feels detached from reality. This project challenges that disconnect by making us observe the fragments-the parts that we often ignore or never notice. By reconstructing faces in a way that feels disjointed, the project reflects the way we see homelessness: fragmented, incomplete, misunderstood.

I find myself wondering: what would the Instagram models we admire look like if they experienced hardship? And then I realise-they would look just like the individuals I photograph, just like the people we pass by every day. In the end, people are people. No matter how fragmented our perceptions or how manipulated our images, beneath it all, we are the same.

This project aims to remind us of that truth by making us look deeper, beyond the pixels, beyond the layers of distortion.