ID-IDENTITY
A photo project by Susanne Junker
ID-Identity is an interactive long-term project in which people, young and old, women, men, healthy, and ill, paint their faces in shorter or longer sessions and workshops without a mirror, while I photographically document this process. In doing so, the participants place themselves in an unfamiliar situation, because they lose control over an everyday ritual that corresponds to their self-image and beauty ideal, or they apply makeup for the very first time in their lives.
ID-Identity workshop, China Academy of Art Shanghai, China, 2018 / ID-Identity portrait #I1O5264, 60 x 80 cm, c-print, 2018
Without the possibility of controlling line and color in the mirror, they reveal a great deal about themselves. It takes courage to embrace the imperfect, the eccentric, and the so-called ugly. At the same time, this deviation from the familiar often has a remarkably liberating, freeing, and inspiring effect on many participants. They open up and reveal how much imagination, frustration, resistance, convention, surprise, or freedom they associate with the act of blind makeup application.
I began the project in 2006 in Shanghai, where I was living at the time. Since then, I have held sessions and workshops in various places around the world, with hundreds of encounters, including in the United States, France, and Spain, as part of my teaching program „Me-Art-Me“ at the China Academy of Art in Shanghai, and most recently in 2025 as part of my major solo exhibition „So What!“ at the Kunsthalle in Augsburg, Germany.
For the photo shoots, I provide the participants and since #MeToo, more and more men have also been signing up for the sessions, with all kinds of makeup materials. The actual photo session then lasts as long as the participants feel necessary. So far, the shortest lasted 30 seconds, and the longest nearly an hour.
ID-Identity portrait #_I1O0674, 60 x 80 cm, c-print, 2012
ID-Identity portrait #_I1O7733, 60 x 80 cm, c-print, 2013
Meanwhile, I sit opposite the participants with my camera and document these intimate moments and the process by which the unmade-up face gradually becomes a very special kind of self-portrait, bearing witness to spontaneous, free, and radical openness, strength, and vivid expression. In their uncontrolled imperfection, the faces radiate a beauty and an aesthetic of their own, impossible to imitate.
ID-Identity gives participants the freedom to bravely experience a new facet of themselves. By removing the mirror, we also loosen the shackles of the beauty norms imposed on us and through which we are socialised.