Photographer invites you to become part of living archive
Charlie Fox is creating towering portraits so detailed you can see skin follicles, building a longitudinal study of faces as they change over time.
A Canterbury photographer, who has a project that turns portraits into time capsules, is inviting new faces into his lens at a Christchurch studio next week.
For more than a decade, Charlie Fox has been creating time-lapse portraits. The full-size versions are a towering 1.2 metres-tall and rendered at a staggering 150 megapixels. The detail, in full on his website, is to the point out that viewers can see skin follicles.
"I encourage people to put their noses up against the paper and just drink in the quality," Fox told Nights.
Daniel Heaphy, photographed nine years apart for the Panochron project.
Charlie Fox
"The eyes of the images especially, you can see the reflection of me in the catch light. That's the level of detail that we're playing with…
"I think the subjects are very brave to participate because they're shown in such extreme levels of detail and quality that I haven't really seen it anywhere else."
The project, Panochron, began in 2013 and has since captured 30 people, including 12 repeat participants.
Fox hopes to reconnect with his earliest subjects and photograph them again, building what one friend described as a “longitudinal study” of the human face.
Elizabeth Lane, photographed in 2016 and 2025.
Charlie Fox
Some participants under 18 return annually, which Fox hopes will serve as a mini-movie of their journey into adulthood.
"In life, you have a lot of choice about things, but you don't have any choice at all about the passage of time, that's just a steady fact."
Alongside the portraits, he now records brief interviews, asking subjects what they would say to their younger selves and inviting them to leave a message to be heard in a decade's time.
"Some really interesting conversations will be had between them with themselves, I think, through this."
Photographer Charlie Fox and the portrait he took of Daniel Heaphy in 2016.
Supplied / Daniel Heaphy
Fox, who has spent 25 years behind the camera, traces his fascination with this portrait style back to a black-and-white 35mm portrait that first captivated him.
"Ever since then, I've just been sort of driven to keep capturing images in this style."
Bookings with Fox for Sunday and Monday are available through the Photosynthesis Studio website.
