make an abstracted portrait of a person's face, similar to a jigsaw puzzle. Each tile is a photo cut from black and white contact sheets that Georgi either shot himself or found discarded while at school. "I had all these negative contact sheets that I don't usually use," he says. "They just get buried somewhere or thrown away. And while I was in school they were cleaning out the lab and there were boxes and boxes of old contact sheets from past students that were left there for maybe twenty years, and I wondered why they would throw them away and thought maybe there was something I could do with them." He says the process is similar to the working method of a famous painter from the 1970s and 80s, a painter whose name he can't quite remember at the moment, even though he's able to give a fairly vivid description of him from memory—a bald and bearded man who suffered from a disease that left him paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. "I can't remember the name," he says, "but I'll find it for you." The final portraits are rebuilt versions of photographs that Georgi has previously taken of his subject. While the original
photograph may take only a fraction of a second to capture, the constructed portrait can take weeks of long hours of tedious work to create. Rebuilding the portrait from scratch allows Georgi the time to become closer to the piece instead of simply taking the shot and moving on to the next one. "It's a challenge to find the images and put them in the right place," he says. "For example, here you need one that is half dark and half light, and then you need one that's almost but not completely white next to it. It's fun looking for them, and it brings a sense of satisfaction once you find a piece that matches. It's rewarding." We're interrupted by a knock at the door, and while Georgi is away it gives me a chance to take a closer look at each portrait. In one, a young white woman screams in anger or pain, her mouth open like a chasm that spills into darkness. In another, a young black man stares directly at us, defiant and confident, his eyes wide and focused, almost as a challenge. In the third, a man with a full face and thick mustache appears to be in quiet contemplation, albeit with a confused, penetrating gaze. All three portraits feature the face of the subject up close, as if we're standing mere inches from a mirror but looking at an unfamiliar, dis-
“I’m trying to show you not what things are,” he says, “but what they aren’t.”
114
\ stardust-mag.com