Facity Documents the Faces of Cities

Facity is an online photo project in which photographers from cities around the world submit portraits documenting faces found within their respective cities. The project, which started at the end of 2008 in Berlin, has grown to 88 photographers in 58 different cities, and currently publishes 10-15 new portraits per day.

Facity attempts to ensure a similar look across each submitted portrait by publishing aesthetic guidelines they call the FACITY manifest. These rules govern everything from lighting (indoor natural light) to equipment (50mm lens at f/2.8), and seem to be quite effective at standardizing the style of submitted portraits.

One thing we noticed was that Facity photographers have quite a knack for capturing brilliant expressions on the faces of babies:

If you’d like to participate, you can volunteer to be either a model or a photographer. The only requirement for being a model is that you need to live in a city that has a photographer, while volunteering as a photographer requires that you create at least one portrait per week for six months.