What is PhotofitMe?

PhotofitMe is an artistic portrait experiment. Upload an image of your real self and our AI studies your face, measuring proportions, classifying features, cross-referencing a catalogue of photographic strips then assembles an AI-generated composite portrait in the style of the original 1970s Photofit system. The result is part likeness, part artefact: something that sits in the uncanny territory between a forensic record and a work of art.

We built it because the Photofit aesthetic is unlike anything else. The grainy strips, the slight misalignments, the clinical annotations which all carry a very specific visual weight. Photographs capture; Photofits interpret. There is something revealing about seeing your own face broken into component parts and reassembled by a system that was never designed to be flattering, only approximate.

Once your composite is generated, it is yours. Download it, share it, or order it printed on a postcard, art print or a t-shirt. Submit it to the gallery and add your face to the unique archive that captures both the now and then. We think the collection, over time, will become something genuinely interesting to look at. A fascinating portrait of whoever decides to show up at this moment in time.

The original system was invented by Jacques Perry, a British physiognomist who spent decades studying the geometry of the human face. Introduced to UK police forces in 1970, it replaced the earlier Identikit system, which used line drawings, with photographic strips of real facial features: hairlines, brows, eyes, noses, mouths, chins.

Witnesses could select from a catalogue of hundreds of options for each zone, building up a composite that reflected what they had actually seen rather than what a sketch artist had interpreted.

The system was used in some of the most significant criminal investigations in British history through the 1970s and 1980s. Its outputs, slightly misaligned, printed on thin card, annotated in typed capitals, became a defining visual document of that era. There is a precision to them that feels authoritative, and a strangeness that feels deeply human and disconnected at the same time.

Photofit was gradually replaced through the 1990s by software-based systems such as E-FIT and FACEGEN, which offered greater flexibility and more naturalistic results. But the original analogue composites have endured as cultural objects, reproduced in true crime books, exhibited in galleries, and recognised instantly by anyone who grew up during that period. PhotofitMe is an affectionate and curious return to that system, rebuilt for a new context.

Maggetti is an artistic studio focused on creative adventures. We make things that sit at the intersection of art, culture, technology and design; projects that start with a question we find genuinely interesting and see where it leads. PhotofitMe is one of those projects.

We are a small team. We like making things carefully, releasing them into the world, and seeing what happens next.