See yourself reflected.
Two-way mirror, camera, and the remote in your hand — photo booths reimagined. Over two million self-authored portraits across 16 countries and 17 years.
Each portrait is authored by the person in it. Over two million now form a record of how people choose to be seen – a living archive. The Self-Portrait Project sits where art, technology, and social change meet, and reinvents the photographic process as a regenerative system for self-representation.
A participatory art concept which turns subject into photographer, and a living archive which holds the self-portraits.
Our patented system, built from scratch — versatile, adaptable, and ever-evolving.
Self-authorship for underrepresented voices. The principle that runs underneath everything: nothing about us without us.
Three ways to be reflected.
We've developed the full stack — camera, mirror, software, delivery — so the same system adapts to any room. Bring it to your space, find a permanent mirror near you, or sit with the project in our studio.
See yourself reflected in others.
Participant-authored, ever-expanding, reflecting different faces in it every single day. With our consent-driven process, the person who makes an image is the one who decides if it becomes public. Less an image album than a living collection of human experience.
Self-authorship for underrepresented voices.
We carry the system to underrepresented & marginalized communities around the world, so that the people who inhabit them can tell their own stories on their own terms — Haiti after the 2010 earthquake; seven cities across the West Bank of Palestine. The roots run back to Other Worlds, documenting alternative economies which share an organizing principle:
“Nothing about us without us.”
Built from scratch.
Every part of the project — the two-way mirror system, the remote in your hand, the software, the archive — we developed ourselves. A patented method, a family of camera triggers, creative software, and a fully owned stack that adapts to any space and feeds a living archive of millions of portraits.
Frontend, capture, software, delivery, and the archive infrastructure are all ours — which is why the booth is only ever the entry point, never the whole of it.
Explore the technologyA prototype of the world we want to live in.
As part of his work with non-profit Other Worlds, Self-Portrait Project creator + creative director Andy Lin photographed communities around the globe living outside of a profits-over-people paradigm — such as the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, worker-owned factories in Argentina, a traditional gifting economy in Mali, and the indigenous-led Zapatistas of Chiapas.
These communities had a shared implementation of systems designed to build capacity back into the people who lived inside them, encapsulated by the motto of international peasant movement La Via Campesina: “nothing about us without us”.
Inspired by these same alternative economies, the Self-Portrait Project models the world we want to live in, doing so in three distinct ways: in how our system of photography works, in how we implement it in the world, and in how we structure the organization itself.
Read the full storyBring a mirror to your space — or just say hello.
Events, permanent installations, brand activations, partnerships, or licensing — we’re open to creative, mutually beneficial ways of working together.
hello@selfportraitproject.com · +1 917.714.3492