On Behance, I came across a photographer named Xi Huang who reminded me of horror manga artist Junji Ito's work Tomie, which intrigued me. This series is simply called Untitled. https://www.behance.net/xi-huang
I contacted the photographer asking how they achieved this face melting effect, and they've told me it's the result of taking lots of raw material, picking some good references and drawing in Photoshop. I thought I could play around with black & white double exposure and use the Liquify tool in Photoshop, duplicating and displacing the image, etc. Here are some illustrations of Tomie (the titular manga character) that show her face morphing into the anomalous creature:
Tomie is the reification of several classic sins, but is also characterised as a supernatural sociopath whose beauty is incomperable, driving those around her to insanity for her entertainment. When photographed, her real form is shown, that being a monstrous 'body-horror' nightmare face symbolising the duality and deceit of her appearance to the world. This inspired me because to a much less extreme extent, we all perform for others and can easily behave in self-serving ways. Perception management and attention seeking are common reactions to very human feelings.
To try and emulate this effect, I asked classmate Diana to take some self-portraits at various angles. In the same way Huang took hundreds of reference photos, I asked for variety of material to combine in post. I didn't want to exactly recreate either reference images, but create a swirling abstract effect to bring together the multiplicity of faces. I used content aware fill for the backgorund, masking to combine her two faces, smudge tool for the effect, black & white adjustment layer and an oil paint filter for final stylisation. Here is my edited image:
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