Creepy self-portraits by Oliver Turpin

There sure isn’t anything that a photographer can’t do if he puts his mind to it. Photographer Oliver Turpin shows just how gruesome, yet compelling photography can be with the help of the right technique and… snow.

Turpin’s bizarre collage of self-portraits in snow.

Young photographer Oliver Turpin is an Internet sensation due to his series of whimsical self-portraits that can raise both admiration and awe, in a genuine show of the beautiful art of the quasi-grotesque.

Screams caught in snow

With the use of his Canon EOS 7D, Yorkshire-based Oliver Turpin manages to give his audience a good scare with his series Snow Portraits, by sticking his face in snow and capturing it in such a way that it makes it seem like he is in some sort of severe pain, or being photographed while having a terrible nightmare. And what an expressive dreamer!

This must look like someone’s worst nightmare, especially when there are multiple faces in the shot. It appears that multiple souls are captured somewhere and they are desperately trying to escape this whole ordeal.

The project has been described as bizarre, but there are reasons for this and anybody can see them. Whether you are spooked or not, you can still see the greatness of the project, which truly is an artistic masterpiece.

Illusion in the form of reality

Although the shots are breathtakingly detailed, they only depict the mere imprints, even though the viewers might be fooled into thinking that they are witnessing the act of someone taking a photo of his face somehow from underneath the coat of snow.

His trick in getting this result is illuminating the snow from underneath, by placing it on a glass surfaced table and fixing the lights under it, which makes the final images a bit similar to the iconic Shroud of Turin, the famous cloth imprinted figure associated with Jesus Christ, as observed by Michael Zhang.

The reliability of this technique has already been questioned by photography aficionados, who doubt that it could give such a realistic effect. But whether the collection was shot with an infrared setup, as some claim, whether it was inverted in post processing, as other viewers guess, or whether it was, indeed, created through such a simple, yet innovative technique, the goal was reached: people either love it, dislike it, or doubt it, but one thing is for sure: Snow Portraits leaves no one indifferent.