Mobolaji Ogunrosoye's Photocollage Portraits Challenge Facial Recognition and Identity Assumptions

Mobolaji Ogunrosoye creates layered photocollage portraits that deliberately obscure facial expressions to question photography's ability to capture personality. Her series Portraits (2022–) includes Zara, One Within the Other (2025), which combines three black-and-white photo cutouts to form a composite face with intentional gaps and overlaps. The artist photographs subjects, then prints images on different papers, sometimes using coffee granules for color and burning edges to create a textured, skin-like appearance. Ogunrosoye's work resists easy interpretation, challenging both facial recognition technologies that often misread Afrocentric features and historical pseudoscientific practices like physiognomy. The portraits highlight how photographs in contemporary society—from social media profiles to passport images—substitute for physical presence, even serving as burial substitutes in some southeastern Nigerian communities when bodies are absent. Samuel Fosso's African Spirits (2008) self-portrait series, where he impersonates Black liberation figures, demonstrates how appearances can be manipulated, but Ogunrosoye's layered approach instead emphasizes what remains unseen. Her technique forces viewers to reconsider assumptions made when looking at faces, suggesting that true identity exists beyond surface representation.