A Hundred Sittings

A Hundred Sittings

An imaginary archive holds 101 portraits of one person, sat for once a year from the day they were born until the day they turned a hundred. Move the scale under the print and the archive turns to that year.

The sitter has no name because the sitter has no original. There is no photograph of them anywhere in this page, and none was used to build it — a photographic aging sequence of a real person is exactly the thing a portrait right protects, so the piece does not contain one. What it contains is a model of a head: a silhouette that changes shape with age, a field of bumps and grooves laid over it, and a light. Every plate is that model evaluated at an age and cut into line work while you watch. Nothing is traced, sampled or stored.

Why it still reads as one person

Because five things never move. The left brow sits higher than the right in the newborn and in the centenarian. There is a mole under the right cheekbone in all 101 plates. The head is turned three degrees away from the lens every time. The bridge of the nose takes a slight aquiline turn as soon as there is a bridge to turn, and keeps it. And the studio collar is the same collar.

Everything else is a function of a single number.

Between	What the model is doing
0 – 6	The braincase is already near its adult size and the face is not, so the eye line sits well below the middle of the head, the forehead is enormous, and the eyes — near adult width at birth — look far too big for the face. That one ratio is most of what “infant” means.
6 – 20	The face lengthens under a cranium that has stopped. The mandible squares and gains an angle at the back, the brow comes forward over the orbit, the nose gets a bridge, the cheek’s fat pad empties.
20 – 40	Structurally finished. What changes is upholstery — where the fat sits, and how the skin folds when it is set down and left.
40 – 65	Creases stop flattening out. Volume leaves the middle of the face and reappears lower, so the cheekbone reads more clearly and the jawline reads less. The upper lid begins to hood, the red of the lip narrows, the hair loses its pigment from the temples inward.
65 – 100	The nose and the ears are the only features that never stopped growing, and the arithmetic becomes visible. Skin follows bone instead of fat, and the plate itself thins — where there were four crossings of hatch at thirty there is one, and the paper does the rest.

The margin lists what is changing fastest at the age you are looking at. That is not a caption written by hand: the model is thirty named curves through life, and the readout differentiates each of them at the current year and ranks the top three. At four it is the hair — coming in, and darkening — with the proportion of face to skull behind it. At twenty-two it is the brow and the shoulders. At fifty-two it is the lip and the jawline.

How it is drawn

The tone is not painted. It is carried by the width of a ruled line, the way it is on a banknote or in a newspaper hedcut. Rows of line run across the plate; each row bulges where the form comes forward, and swells in width where the light falls away, so a single stroke does the modelling and the shadow at once. Dark passages get a second family of lines crossing them at a steep angle. Each row is filled as one polygon, which is what keeps a complete re-engrave inside one animation frame while you are dragging.

The wrinkles are not drawn either. A fold is a groove in the height field — a very thin, very shallow, negative nose — so it is shaded into being and catches the light on one side, which is why it reads as a fold rather than a pen mark. Only the deepest ones get a line cut over the top, and only after the age at which they have stopped flattening out.

Control	What it does
The scale	Drag it, or click a year. It is a real slider: tab to it and the arrow keys step a year, shift five, page up and down a decade, home and end the ends of the life.
The print	Drag left and right across the portrait itself to scrub through about seventy years of it.
The contact strip	Eleven decades, each engraved from the same model at thumbnail size. Click one to travel there.
Run the life	Plays 0 to 100 in about forty-six seconds. Held still if your system asks for reduced motion.