Vanity Mirror is a work of algorithmic portraiture, and a response to the iconography of the selfie. The selfie has become the dominant photographic act of our time, and the gesture behind it, raising the phone, hunting for the angle, swiping past the imperfect frame, has reshaped how a generation thinks about its own image. Vanity Mirror short-circuits that logic. There is no perfect angle to find, because the work shows every angle at once. Not the best image, but every image at the same time.
The technical foundation draws on research carried out at Stanford University into synthetic aperture camera arrays. That work demonstrated how a sufficiently dense lattice of lenses, treated as a single computational system, can capture spatial information unavailable to any one camera. Vanity Mirror redirects the principle towards self-portraiture. The conceptual antecedent is David Hockney’s photographic collages of the early 1980s, in which Polaroids were laid into multi-image grids that recorded a subject across time and across viewpoint. Hockney’s joiners argued that a single photograph was a fiction, and that the truer record of a moment was an assembly of partial views. Vanity Mirror takes that argument and flips its temporal logic. The image is no longer assembled after the fact. It is generated live, continuously shifting with the subject, and the subject is the viewer.
What the work asks is straightforward. In an age trained to see itself one filtered image at a time, what does it mean to be confronted with every view at once?

‍