At least once in a lifetime, we will all lose our head over something or someone.
For designer Guiseppe Pepe, however, this happens every day, through his #LoosingMyMind photo series.
#LoosingMyMind is the creative brainchild of Italian designer Giuseppe Pepe.
Born in Sicily, Pepe (better known by his Instagram name, pepedsgn) first began experimenting with photo editing and altering at fourteen years old. As an adult, his passion for nightlife and DJ culture led him to Ibiza, Spain, where he now works as Head Designer at Space Ibiza. He credits the island’s energy as a driving force for his creativity.
The idea for the #LoosingMyMind project came to Pepe one day on the beach: conceived as a statement against the fake, perfected beauty of over-edited photos, he took the idea a leap further by editing the heads out of the photos entirely, thus shifting the focus and interest to the graphics and the edit itself. In a way, it is the ultimate anti-selfie concept.
The project may have started by chance, but to expand it Pepe decided to leverage Instagram, originally by asking people he followed and who followed him to submit photos which he could then repost, headless, on his own account as part of the #LoosingMyMind series, and later by opening the idea to the entire Instagram community. He was pleasantly surprised by the response: it quickly gathered momentum, taking on a life of its own as a crowdsourced art project. Today, image submissions for #LoosingMyMind come from all over the world, allowing Pepe to select to edit only the ones he feels will make an appropriate statement, those in which he can “see something.”
The #LoosingMyMind project is ongoing; you can follow it (or – if the idea of losing your head appeals – send in one of your own photos to be considered for ‘decapitation’) on Instagram. You can also see more from Giuseppe Pepe, on Facebook or his website.
