Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Doppelgänger, Darwin and ... Crayolas

This week is Doppelgänger Week on The Book of Faces, and it's raised a few important questions: 
  1. Does Christopher Walken have a Facebook account?
  2. Does Christopher Walken know that he bears an uncanny resemblance to that Second Viennese School hunk, Alban Berg?
I'm pretty sure that the answer to Question #1 is a resounding 'no' (Though my preliminary research did lead me to some amazing things, including a Facebook page for an event planning service called "Asians doing Christopher Walken Impressions."). As for Question #2, I'd wager that CW remains blissfully unaware of the fact that he is the doppelgänger of a dead Austrian composer. Nevertheless, I submit these photos for your evaluation:
 

And now it's time for one of my favorite games: Caption This Profile Pic! (though I doubt the subjects of these pictures actually have profile pics, so this round should probably just be called Caption this Pic!, but that just sounds ridiculous.) Anyway, The Picture Show recently featured a new book called Darwin's Camera, by Phillip Prodger. Apparently, Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was "the first photographically illustrated science book ever published." However, the pictures weren't taken by Darwin, they were done by Oscar Rejlander, a pioneer in Victorian photography/notorious for his erotic photographs of children/real-life chums with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as writer/mathematician/fellow nudey-photo enthusiast Lewis Carroll). And some of them are hilarious.

There are some really ridiculous hair styles in some renderings that I didn't include, because Darwin had those drawn from the photos of Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who used electrical currents to study and photograph the facial expressions of his patients, and they're just absolutely terrifying and heartwrenching. Like this one: 
But all the other pictures are fair game, so start captioning! These pictures also reminded me that I really want to see this movie.

And now for something a little more bright and cheery:


Did you know that at the current rate of Crayola color expansion (an increase of 2.56% per year), by the year 2050, there could very well be 330 crayons in an average box of crayons? Well, that's not good enough for Christian Faur, who has assembled these amazing pieces using more than 100,000 hand cast crayons of varying colors and shades!

Here's what a close-up of his work looks like:

No comments:

Post a Comment