Arcimboldo in Photographs

Painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo  made a study of portraits in a manner most unique. Rather than using his palate of colors in the traditional manner he actually made a departure and painted vegetables and fruits or branches and flowers to depict his “people” in pictures.

Recently photographer Klaus Enrique took on a project of redefining these 400 year old Arcimboldo painting through photography. Enrique studied all the famous paintings and then went about reconstructing them with real life vegetables, fruits, flowers, etc., to recreate them.

Once they had been recreated to the closest approximation that he could reach, he photographed these replicas of the original paintings. Enrique feels that actual photographs bring a rawness to the image that paintings could never begin to conceive. Inspired by his success with the older paintings, he has now set about constructing faces of newer celebrities such as Princess Diana.

How would you go about constructing your own face in fruits and vegetables? What berries or bark could go into making such an image? Why not set up a science project where you reconstruct a popular person’s portrait using the Arcimboldo  technique and then the modern ease of using a photograph to preserve it for eternity?