Beyond the 1.5 x 2 inch box

The project consists of 65 application forms for admission into an F+F experimental school, Zurich Switzerland. I worked as a research assistant on F+F 1971 archives, lead by Dr. Michael Hiltbrunner and came across these admission forms while cataloguing the school archives.What binds my interest in those admission forms is the unconventional way these students have pasted their ‘Visual Identity’. The Institute forms has formal structure, a 1.5 x 2 inch box frame drawn on top right expecting the admittee to fill it up with passport photograph.

 

All the 65 admission forms include photographs of admittees communicating their individuality through face cut-outs, illustrations, mugshots with comical expressions etc. This though opens a discourse about exposing the growing gaps between personal identity and State sanctioned Identification. 

 

The project  aims to explore Institutional premises that has underlying modern identification practices but it succumbs one’s identity to a passport photograph expected to be pasted in a box at a specific location on the paper. Passport photograph has its own terminology in the state. It has formal components—an isolated and emotionless face gazing straight ahead, with a bland background adding to the monotony. Its questions the centrality of the face to both personal identity and its bureaucratic expression; the face functions doubly as a site for individual recognition, where memory and emotional expression are central and collective registration, where race and sex are primary concerns.

 

I grew to believe, the act of going beyond the 1.5 x 2 inch box was to emancipate one’s individuality, to grown beyond state sanctioned official representation.