John Vanco, from the Face Map series, 2011
Archival pigment print
44 × 44 inches
Edition of 2
August 31, 2026
How do you translate a three-dimensional form into a two-dimensional image? Bruce Katsiff presents an answer here that feels both radical and steeped in history. Most photography employs a single exposure and vantage point, which yields an appearance of receding space akin to the one-point perspective pioneered by Renaissance painting. When Picasso and Braque sought to grapple more directly with three-dimensional form and space, it was this single vantage point that they gave up to do so. Likewise, Bruce Katsiff uses about 50 individual photographs—each a facet with its own vantage point—to record the human head in his portraits. Katsiff calls this work his Face Map series, emphasizing its resemblance to cartographic projection, whereby the three-dimensional surface of the Earth is mapped, in a distorted form, onto a flat plane.
Bruce Katsiff has enjoyed a long career as both a photographer and, from 1989–2012, the Director/CEO of the James A. Michener Art Museum in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. This portrait depicts his friend and colleague John Vanco, who served as the director of the Erie Art Museum from 1968–2017.
