How Alex Wadelton and Marcus Byrne made world news with One Millimeter portrait series

A deliberately provocative series of portraits of world leaders with their skin removed, has garnered global attention for Melbourne duo retoucher Marcus Byrne and Alex Wadelton, ECD at Zoo Group.

Timed to coincide with the recent G7 Summit held in late May in Sicily, the series aims to make viewers look past the colour of skin and realise that underneath we are all members of the same race. World leaders featured include Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Theresa May, Narendra Modi, Jacob Zuma, Angela Merkel, Xi Jinping, and Malcolm Turnbull.

From a single post on Bored Panda that has attracted more than 14,000 views, the series began to gain traction, soon being picked up by Design Boom, where it had more than 30,000 views in the first day. Since then, it has moved out of the design realm and into world-wide political news.

So far it has attracted attention in Slovenia, Hungry, CNN Turkey, Spain, France, Ireland, Russia Czech Republic, USA, UK, India, Thailand, China, Ukraine, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Estonia, before finally making its way to the front page of the Mirror UK and the Daily Mail websites.

Says Wadelton: “It’s been pretty crazy seeing it get more and more attention across the world. Hopefully just a few of the people who have seen it have stopped for a second to think about of the very simple and obvious fact that we are all humans, and we should all just take care of each other. Somehow that seems to get lost in the constant grapple for power that grips the world. Also, being described as “one of the world’s best-paid advertising engineers” on a Hungarian website, and as “an obvious nut job liberal” on the Daily Mail are career highlights.”

Says Byrne: “A teacher got in touch, saying he wanted some large prints for his school, because the images are unique and help create conversation about power, racism, prejudice and discrimination. To have that sort of effect on people has been amazing. Some people have even approached to have a portrait done of themselves in this style, which is pretty cool, if a tad disturbing.”

High quality prints can be purchased from https://onemillimeter.org/ with 10% of each sale going to the United Nations Foundation.