The Portrait Machine #27. Bill Powers

I started making these as a way to play with the authorship of a photographic portrait. The power-play between the photographer, camera and subject became a performance in which the subject could try to influence the camera and I could try to influence the subject. I was interested in the camera’s role of providing an insight within that dynamic, so I used a Polaroid aura camera developed by an American inventor in an attempt to record what a psychic might see. Electromagnetic sensors connect the subject to the camera which translates these readings into information about them. This is depicted as color in the Polaroid and printed by the camera as a description. I’ve made portraits with p...View all