Friday 14 December 2012

You May Remember A Film Called Finding Benjaman,

the name is the pseudonym adopted by a man who has dissociative amnesia,

around 6:00 AM EDT on August 31, 2004, a man was discovered behind a Burger King at the intersection of Interstate 95 and Highway 17 in Richmond Hill, Georgia, according to the manager, there were no weapons found at the scene, paramedics reported that there were three depressions in his head, that may indicate blows by a blunt object, when found, he had no memory of who he was, and did not even recognise his own face, He was legally blind with cataracts, indicating he may have been without medical care for some time before he was assaulted, initially, he was known as BK because he was discovered on the premises of a Burger King, since then, he has chosen to live under the name Benjaman Kyle, 


now here is the thing, Benjaman now lives completely in limbo, for the past 8 years he has been denied the ability to obtain a new social security number which in turn prevents him from opening a bank account or having a credit card, the US government argues that he already has one, but despite the efforts of fingerprint matching, DNA tests, and exposure on television, he simply cannot determine his true identity, reading of his plight and watching the film artist Miguel Endara was inspired to help, by using a couple of million dots to make a picture of Benjaman in the hope that he would be recognised,

Endara embarked on this portrait of Benjaman using stippling, a tedious technique which involves a pen, patience, and an obscene amount of dots, the portrait took nearly 138 hours to complete, and at a rate of 4.25 dots per second, he estimates the piece contains roughly 2.1 million of them,

it is an amazing piece of work, made even more poignant by the fact that that Benjaman is still unknown, but what talent the artist Miguel Endara has.

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