Welcome to the Most Interesting Person project.

Each participant in this project is part of a unique group who have been asked to describe the most interesting person they know, and create an interview portrait of them. This person in turn takes us to their most interesting person, who then takes us to theirs, and so on.  This is a ‘trail’, constructed through a linear format representing the most interesting people living in a particular location and at a particular time.  As a collective they embody the culture’s greatest ideas, pursuits and variety and thus render a fascinating portrait of the society in which we live.

Each new subject becomes the director, steering the project through their individuality and creative style.  They document the next through photography, film, text and even old fashioned pen and paper with a blank book passed from each participant to the next.

The Symposium of Interesting

The website is the online facet of the project. In tandem we began hosting real life Symposiums, launching in Berlin in 2010 at the Ballhaus Ost and at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2011.
The Symposium of Interesting invites the participants of the project; the city’s ‘most interesting’ people, to take the stage for 15 minutes to say, do, show, present, perform, anything they like.  Unlike other symposiums our invitees are not selected by a single producer; they are invited by each other with the aim of inspiring a conversation point for the city.

History

Mapping the trails began in 2004 by project founder, Stuart Acker Holt. Holt, a photographer, started this as a photographic project inspired by a conversation with his university professor on a road trip!  Since then Holt, has documented close to 200 people in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, New York and Sâo Paulo through the format.