Who’s That Girl?

I’m afraid I couldn’t bear to have the picture in the post below appearing at the top of the screen each time I looked at my journal, so I decided to write an entry quickly to push it down a bit.

Someone in the house where I have a room subscribes to New Scientist magazine, and, occasionally, when I’m eating my lunch or have nothing else to do, I’ll pick up a copy and absorb all the latest information on a world that seems to be changing far too quickly.

The 2nd of October issue of New Scientist fell on the doormat with the morning post and I picked it up and put it, with the letters and so on, on the kitchen table. The magazine was still in its plastic wrapping, but I could see the cover. Next to the headline ‘the secrets of the face’ was a very simple picture of a young lady’s face. It appeared to be a photograph treated in some way or another, perhaps with airbrushing. I know very little about these things.

It was a simple picture, as I have said, and yet I found it fascinating. This model, whoever she was, had been chosen to represent the concept of ‘face’, and what an inspired choice she was! How had they found her? Her face seemed very pure and, yes, simple, but it seemed to glow with some inner light. I also felt that maybe I had met her before somewhere. Does this girl have the same effect on everyone she meets? Did the photographer or designer, or whoever was responsible, see her walking down the street and think, “It has to be her!”? Or was she one of a number of models who could have been chosen, whom, it was decided, they could work some photographic magic upon to create a particular effect they already had in mind of… But how would they have formulated this effect in their plans? Innocence? Enigma? Beauty? It was not quite any of these. Or rather, it seemed to be something more. I tried to formulate why the face was so fascinating and the closest I could come was that it was something of the ‘girl-next-door’ appeal, but elevated to the level of the sublime.

Since the magazine was not mine, I did not take it out of its plastic wrapper to read the article within and solve this mystery. I had to wait. But I wanted to know, who is that girl? Who is she?

Eventually the magazine was taken from its wrapper and I discovered the truth. The picture is the work of artist Chris Dorley-Brown and is part of an exhibition called ‘Future Face’ that is running in London from the 10th of October to the 13th of February. The face is actually a composite face. That is, with the aid of computers, sixteen different faces have been taken and merged together into one face. The girl on the cover who I was sure I had met before somewhere – she didn’t exist. She was a ghost distilled from other people. A ghost that had never lived.

I practically shivered at this discovery.

Inside the magazine was a similar picture of a male face. He looked like her brother. In fact, he too was a ghost of averages, created by the same technique. As the article says:

“They have an eerie, luminous, almost ghost-like quality… As more and more faces were added, this unearthly beauty emerged as the distillation of youth. True beauty, it seems, is the average of everyone.”

Well, that’s the end of my little ghost story. It is short, I’m afraid, and very simple, but it does have a twist at the end, as all ghost stories should. However, I’m at a loss as to what the moral of the story might be. Is it something to do with the responsibility that both artists and scientists should feel when they play God, but too often don’t? Is it to do with the loss of the soul behind the face in modern society? Is it to do with unreachable ideals? Is it to do with the unnoticed beauty of the ordinary? I really don’t know. Only, it continues to haunt me.