FUTURE PROJECTS

2026

Rosa Franco Mendoza

Self-Portraits —

The age we appear to be

This project begins with a question: how old is a face, really?

I want to bring together and create a series of self-portraits made throughout my life to observe how time manifests itself in my own image. Not as a chronological record of physical changes, but as an exploration of something much more subjective: the age we appear to be and the age we feel.

There are times when our face seems much older than our age would suggest. At other times, perhaps surprisingly, it seems younger. Fatigue, joy, sadness, illness, desire, confidence or uncertainty can all change our appearance.

The project also proposes playing with this perception: disrupting time, juxtaposing different self-portraits and asking ourselves what age we attribute to each image before knowing when it was taken.

In this way, self-portraiture becomes more than simply a representation of myself; it becomes a play between time, appearance, identity and emotional state.

An archive of my own image to see that the face doesn’t always reveal the age we are, but the age we are going through.