Text-Portraits by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer

What do Kate Moss, Barack Obama, Madonna, Michael Jackson, David Beckham and Audrey Hepburn, amongst other famous people, share in common? They have all been text-portrayed by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer.

Ralph Ueltzhoeffer was born in 1966 in Mannheim, Germany and since 1984 he has been working as a photographer. His works range from installations, such as the web-art-project “Textportrait”, to other medias like photography and personal computers. Concentrating on human aspects, either through black and white or colour photography, the work of Ueltzhoeffer gives a different dimension and value to information and biographies. However, one might wonder what a text portrait is.

Text portrait   |tekstˈpôrtrət; -,trāt|
noun

1.    A symbiosis out of text and photo, biography and portrait. A text portrait is a version of lettering and photo of a usual portrait, with the difference, that the text (e.g. biography) and the photo (e.g. passport picture) create an inseparable symbiosis. The fusion of two visually different components to a readable portrait – the text portrait.

In 2002, Ralph Ueltzhoeffer created one of the first text portraits out of the text: Wikipedia “David Beckham” with a typeface of white on black relating the result visually to the DOS input mode.