The official faces of Sydney that are now displayed on the AMP Tower have an amazing story - while these faces [that you see in the above picture] resemble any regular face in the crowd - they have actually been created and morphed from hundreds of different faces combined into one picture.
The City of Sydney commissioned three former photography lecturers to photograph 3500 of its residents from different ethnic backgrounds. Using data from the Bureau of Statistics, those 3500 portraits were then reduced to 1400, selected to match the cultural mosaic of various suburbs.
In turn, those 1400 portraits of real people - the oldest 93, the youngest just two weeks - were meticulously layered via a special computer program, producing the two fictitious composites.
The plan is to produce the overall Face of Australia by 2008 taking three such faces from every state or territory, each one representing a remote, regional or metropolitan community.
Sydney Morning Herald [Link via email from Sakshi Juneja]
