Smart Photos Show How Face Changes As It Ages

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New York -based photographer, Bobby Neel Adams addresses the effects of the passage of time in one of his projects called -‘Age map’, which is a collection of face images showing the same person at two points within their life. It demonstrates the affects of aging upon the human body, reminding us of our mortality. The images are printed at the same proportions and hand spliced to create a dual representation of the person across decades.

Bobby Neel Adams was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and resides in New York. After graduating from Goddard College in Vermont, he moved to San Francisco, where he lived and worked for the next eighteen years. Much of Adams’ photographic work addresses the transformation of the human body by aging and circumstance. In the late 1980s, he began using a photomontage technique he termed ‘Photo -surgery,’ in which photographs were altered through manual excision, collage, and sometime defacing of the subject.

In the age of 36, he noticed how much he resembled a picture of himself when he was 6. So he decided to create a composite image by slicing the new photo of him and the one where he was a kid. Back in 1989 there were no modern techniques yet. “In the darkroom I sized up both images to the same proportions and made prints,” Adams wrote in an email. “Once these photographs were dry I tore the most recent portrait and laid it on top of the school photo, gluing it down the rubber cement.” Artist still uses the same technique with few innovative methods, like splicing photos of couples and family members and, most recently, posing dead creatures in beautifully haunting scenes.