Off with their heads!
To you, what is the definition of beauty? Is it a beautiful and endless starry night? Is it the warm colours of a summery landscape? Is it a beautiful woman or man? Nowadays, we have a tendency to enhance the natural beauty of people and things and it isn’t rare to see photos of our favorite actors, singers or general celebrities being retouched. Some agencies or photographers are even abusing it, making some models look incredibly thin to the point where they’d lose all humanity.
But Italian photographer and artist Giuseppe Pepe here, had an idea! Aware that our society was focusing too much on a beautiful people’s face, he decided to completely erase it from the picture. The result? an incredible gallery of strangers that lost their mind, literally, and an instagram account under the hashtag #loosingmymind.
Be ready to enter Giuseppe’s crazy idea and project and to listen to his story!
Giuseppe, have you lost your mind? What inspired you to start this project?
Hearing a song of Basement Jaxx, under the sun in a hot weekend on the beach of Ibiza, looking at a group of guys doing stupid selfies with a mirror reflecting the sun and hiding their faces. The problem is when you lose definitely your mind.
Tell us about your life, what got you into photography?
I started doing this as a joke in 2002. I was about 15 years old. It was a very hot summer, I was very young and I started to work in a summer club (I’ve always been interested in club culture), tons of flyers and posters arrived in the club every week for promotion (there wasn’t any web promotion by that time). So whenever I had free time I used to look at them, studying them and trying to understand their meanings and what was behind those images and illustrations. I still remember the “just-printed” smell I used to love. So, it was the end of the summer, I bought a computer and started to spend many nights in front of that box CRT.
After a couple months I started to work in a photographic studio, learning the picture, colors, focus techniques and more and of course learning about the photo retouch, starting to use Photoshop in a sort of professional way. From that moment I realized that maybe I shouldn’t waste that time of learning and could use it to turn it into a job.
Why would you remove those people’s head? What do you want to represent through this headless people in photographs?
We are living in an era where everything is fake, where everything is designed to appear, even a simple photo has lost its spirit due to editing.
I decided to create a project that did reflect this secondary part being the main part of the picture. The head, in some case, is the primary part of our beauty. Imagine now you will lose it forever: how would you look without your head? I’d like to represent the beauty of the picture, but without the head, a part of our body (the main part for sure) but the symbol of this anti-beauty of today, the same part that is ruining some wonders of this planet.
How do people react to your project?
The project was born on instagram. I started asking various people whom I followed because of their photos, but I never expected that I was about to have such an incredible success: a lot of direct messages, emails and comments sent to me every day from every part of this planet congratulating me for this idea, when you read compliments and agree to be part of the project, from a famous igers (instagram users) with a ton of followers for example or from a simple user from Japan or Mexico gives me goosebumps.
Why would you take photos of strangers and not your own?
Simple: on instagram you need to know there’s a sort of virtual “Community” from all over the world. This community is amazing, composed of influential people, famous igers, photographers, creative persons. So I thought the speed of communication that instagram offers to photography lovers inside this big community is the key to spread the message about this project and to let it be shared by world-wide igers.
These photos come from all over the world. I get many. I select the specific criteria
by which I understand that in that particular shot I can see something.
I can imagine how the result would be and get them ready for my daily publications
on my profile.
What type of software do you use to “chop their head off”?
To the many users asking me which “app” I use, I always answer them that I use editing programs like Adobe Photoshop, then move the pics into my smartphone and with a few apps, I change the tonality, the colors, the details. I add at least a little bit of fantasy and, for sure, imagination before the picture completed.
What would you say to the young photographers starting a career or willing to start one?
Always believe in yourself, never stop doing it even when it is blacker than black. Because it is precisely in that color that all the others are hidden.
Any other project in mind? What will the future of #loosingmymind be?
I hope to grow more and more professionally, nothing more. I do not make plans because the exact opposite of what I thought I wanted to do may sometimes happen. And if you’re referring to the project #LoosingMyMind, I hope to be able to give life to these pictures, print them on large format ready for a thousand eyes and not just on smartphones but maybe in areas, as a set up theme.
If some people are willing to lose their mind, how can you make them lose it?
To spend some minutes into my gallery.
Haven’t lost your mind yet? then maybe you need a little bit more of Giuseppe’s art inside your life:
P.A.
