Yesterday, PetaPixel shared photographer Richard Prince’s composite portrat created by blending together 57 faces of girlfriends seen on Seinfeld. I also enjoy playing with the idea of image averaging, and can’t get enough of it. Late last year, I started experimenting with the idea of averaging faces by blending portraits.

I needed a set of faces that were all semi-similar enough to create good averages with. Well, if you haven’t seen the work of photographer Martin Schoeller, you are missing out! He has a series of close-ups that are shot with very similar lighting styles and compositions of famous (and not-so-famous) people. It’s simply mesmerizing to see. I grabbed the shots above to try face averaging out with.
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What you see here are portraits created by taking photographs of women in 40 different countries and averaging them with Face Research software. It’s not clear how many faces were used for each country, but if you’re thinking that the faces are more beautiful than average, then it might be because attractive faces are generally average. You can also play around with the software yourself, either with existing faces or by uploading your own.

Make an Average (via Laughing Squid)