“They are like one of us.
Or rather, we aspire to be like them.”

Origami mask by Francesca Lombardi.

With a love for the textural and the absurd, Italian photographer Giacomo Favilla and designerFrancesca Lombardi team up to create the series One of Us. Titled ‘‘One of Us’’, the project consists of black and white portraits of people sitting in a vintage armchair, while wearing beautiful origami masks.

Their poses are full of an austere Victorianism, ever unknowable and out of reach. Declaring that the “other” is more similar than we would like to believe, One of Us is a surreal hybrid of both man and beast.

With the intention creating an impression of an imaginary world, where animal and human natures blend together as one, each mask has been laboriously folded over and over again to resemble a different animal. Be the animal a puma, a rabbit, a crocodile or a cat – they all take their turn in ‘‘being the face,’’ be that temporarily, of a person sitting to have their photo taken where their most striking feature is the fact that they have no eyes – they are in fact stylised blindfolds in the shape of animals.

photo © Giacomo Favilla.