Behind the scenes video

Public Portrait Project from Dean Casavechia on Vimeo.



Just a short clip of me during the portrait project. Thanks again to Andrew Chow for the video clips. We just used the video mode on my point and shoot camera but it's not too bad.

Almost ready to show

I finished the layout and it turned out to be very large as a final print. I wanted it to be on canvas so I wouldn't need to frame it. Jones House, which is a high end retouching and printing company in Toronto, was able to make a 60 inch wide print. Plus they gave me a great price and made some sharpening adjustments for me. It's now back and sitting in a tube while the stretcher is being made. It's an uncommon size so I had to wait to get the print back before having the stretcher made. Someone is going to stretch the canvas for me because I don't feel like learning about what not to do on such a costly print. I tracked down a painter who makes and stretches large canvases all the time and it should be ready to hang next week, I can't wait.

About the Public Portrait Project

In the end I photographed over 200 people over two days, a week day and a weekend. The weather was great both days I really got lucky with the sun and the number of people that agreed to be photographed. Each person I photographed signed a release and I sent them a copy of their photo. It was difficult to keep track of all the forms as people came and went but I managed to sort it out and in the end everyone ended up with a digital copy of the photo. Packing up all of the gear at the end of the day was an exhausting endeavor but I had such a good time and met lots of really nice people in the process.


Things got really busy in the following months and finding time to edit all the photos was hard. My goal was always to display the images as a collective piece and display it at a location along Spring Garden Road. Laying the images out in a grid was harder then I thought it would be because I wanted to display one shot of everyone that I photographed. In order to do this I had to calculate it just right to make sure that I had enough images. My first layout ended up being way to small but the second time I got it right. The final print is about 5 feet wide and about 4 feet high, which had to be send away to be printed on canvas.


Thanks to Marvin Moore and Andrew Chow for the photos of me working.