Benjamin Kyle is a pseudonym for a 64-year-old man who has been enduring dissociative amnesia for the past 8 years. In 2004, he was found unconscious behind a fast food restaurant in Georgia, suffering from severe sunburn, nearly blind from cataracts, and with no personal belongings to be found.
His ongoing plight has involved months of evaluation, DNA tests, attempts at fingerprint matching, TV interviews and exposure, and even a short film, Finding Benjamin, by John Wikstrom. He has been unable to obtain a social security card because the government claims that he already has one under the unrecovered name. But, as a result of the publicity from the short film, Kyle was able to obtain an identification card, found a job washing dishes, and lives in a small, air-conditioned shed.
Yet Benjamin Kyle still seeks to find his true identity. And that brings us to the Benjamin Kyle project by artist Miguel Endara. The artist was inspired to help this man in some way and so he has created a incredibly realistic black and white illustration using millions of dots to develop incredible details in the portrait. It took Endara more than 138 hours to complete the piece and he estimates that the final print contains roughly 2.1 million of the tiny ink dots.
Endara is selling the prints and according to his website, “50% of all proceeds made through this limited edition will be dedicated to helping Benjaman Kyle retrieve a new SSN and to get his life back on track.”
