1001 Faces
One face, one race — a celebration of human diversity across all origins, ages and genders.
Una Faccia, Una Razza
The 1001 Faces project is a long-term humanitarian photography endeavour — an ongoing effort to document and celebrate the full spectrum of human faces. The name references the ancient Mediterranean proverb una faccia, una razza — one face, one race — asserting that beneath the surface of cultural and ethnic difference, humanity shares one common identity.
ALAgrApHY photographs subjects from all walks of life, all corners of the world, all ages and all genders — gathering an archive of portraits that speaks to both individual dignity and collective belonging.
The photographic archive of 1001 Faces became the training dataset for the first AI-generated artworks — thousands of synthetic faces of all diversity generated by Generative Adversarial Networks trained exclusively on this portrait collection. The project thus bridges humanitarian photography and pioneering AI art.
The Dataset that Changed AI Art History
The 1001 Faces portrait database was used to train the GAN models that generated the Children of the Cloud — one of the first AI-generated artworks in history, first exhibited and sold at the Grand Palais in February 2018. Photography as humanitarian act became the seed of artistic and technological history.