Alter Ego: portraits of gamers and their avatars
Robbie Cooper's Alter Ego project collected photos of gamers and paired them with their in-game avatars. It's just been collected in a handsome hardcover edition with a nifty lenticular cover that shows a nice Korean couple morphing into chaotic evil game-characters.
I read this last night -- what I loved about it was the broadly construed notion of "player." Cooper doesn't just get people who play games for the fun of it, but also an old-school MUD developer (his "avatar" is a block of text from his game), several gold-farmers and miscellaneous other cheats; game developers and models for in-game avatars, and so on. The breadth of gamers interviewed by Cooper is really awe-inspiring: rich and poor, western and Asian, able-bodied and disabled, young and old. It's not all terminally shy, heavyset guys playing skinny little women (though there are some of those) -- Cooper has plenty of people who defy the stereotypes, too. The net effect is to demonstrate the common cause between all the players, no matter what their background: they are all living virtual lives.
Also: it doesn't hurt that these are beautifully shot portrait photos.
Link, Link to thumbnail gallery of photos 1, Link to thumbnail gallery of photos 2
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After summer break, the gallery Paule Friedland & Alexandre Rivault in Paris is now showing the amazing photography show "Alter Ego" by Robbie Cooper, about gammers and virtual worlds...
Show will run until October 27th, every thursday, friday and saturday from 2 to 7pm...
Galerie Paule Friedland & Alexandre Rivault
64, rue des Tournelles, 75003 Paris, France
+331 42 72 40 95
www.myfavoriteartgalleryinparis.com