Please Don’t Smile – Photography for Official Documents | 05.06.2016

Photography swiftly became a tool for creating systems that allow us to identify people and confirm their identities, as evidence to testify to the existence of someone (or something). The photographic portrait comes in handy here: we use photographs for school ID cards, personal ID cards, or passports. From our childhood onward having our face photographed is part of our bureaucratic obligations.
Machines recognize out faces, cameras monitor us on the streets, and our pictures fall into a web of programs that attempt to scan and adapt them to patterns existing God-knows-where. 
Can we call these portraits? How is it possible that machines are able to recognize us? Come join our workshop where we shall try to respond to these questions. We shall encounter various photography techniques that create biometric systems, we shall make portraits and use a camera obscura, as a symbol of a tool for spying, and we shall create sculptures of the traces that our face leaves behind.

This workshop is for people aged 10 to 24.

Please Don’t Smile – Photography for Official Documents (ages 10 to 19)

Led by: Basia Budniak

Date: 05.06, 1 p.m.–4 p.m.

Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art (Audiovisual Hall), pl. Szczepański 3a

Booking: warsztaty@photomonth.com