Psychedelic Portraits Made With a Hunk of Beveled Glass

Photographer Mikayla Whitmore creates these images without any apps or effects filters.

These trippy, colorful portraits look as though they've been run through a dozen different effects in an editing app. They haven't. Actually, the only filter Mikayla Whitmore used to create them was a 4-foot-tall hunk of beveled glass, which her subjects couldn't resist smooshing their faces against.

"I think every person ended up licking the glass or just smearing their entire face against it to get really interesting color fields with the makeup and sweat mixing," Whitmore says. "I used a lot of sanitary products between shoots."

The idea hit Whitmore last year after she quit her job as a photojournalist in Las Vegas and took a trip to Taiwan. Exploring a wacky, space age housing development, she noticed an elaborately cut glass window on an entry door that instantly pixelated anyone who walked behind it. "It was so mesmerizing," she says. "If there was a way I could have purchased or shipped home that exact window, I would have."

It took a while to track down something similar—the first glass shop she called in Las Vegas quoted her $500 for a 7-foot-tall beveled piece she had no idea how to safely use. After a couple weeks, a production designer in Los Angeles helped her find something roughly half that size for just $80. She happily lugged it to the backyard of her partner, the conceptual artist Karin Quindo Miller, and invited friends and acquaintances to come out and sit for portraits behind it.

Nearly 20 people did so over two weekends last August, braving triple-digit temperatures and a blazing sun to pose for 15 minutes each. Whitmore asked them to create exaggerated versions of themselves, so they gussied up with makeup, outfits, and props; one good sport even brought smoke bombs to set off around her. "Sounds great in theory," Whitmore says, "but sitting outside in high heat under a magnifying glass while being enveloped with teal, sulphur-smelling smoke can make anyone's eyes water." She worked quickly, shooting her glass and subject against a fabric backdrop with a Canon 5D Mark IV, flashes, and colored gels. Afterward, she touched up the images in Adobe Lightroom and VSCO—mostly to fix lens aberrations, remove pesky specks of dust on her camera's sensor, and enhance colors that were already there.

"I was taught to try and shoot your images as close to the idea of what you want as possible, versus forming it into the idea you think you want after the fact," Whitmore says. That makes the image-capturing process itself a "more physical, tangible experience"—the kind you sometimes need Windex and paper towels to clean up.

More Great WIRED Stories