THE FACE

Reflections on the history of our current fascination with faces.

In her lavishly illustrated and intellectually provocative study, British historian Bound-Alberti goes back through Western history to uncover how faces became so significant to us and to analyze our preoccupation with optimizing and altering the way our faces appear to ourselves and those who view them. “For most of human history,” she writes, “portrayals of the face have been generic.” People only needed to recognize a few other people in the core group in which they lived, and most people would not have had or felt any need for a mirror in which to regard their own face. Only with the Renaissance did people begin to see a face depicted in a portrait as a “window into the individual soul.” Bound-Alberti pays particular attention to how evaluation of faces and the alleged virtues or vices they reveal can be used to reinforce power structures, with the features common to white Western Europeans being valued and those of people from Africa or Asia devalued. She analyzes with precision the effect on perception of the face of the advent of photography, followed by social media, and raises troubling questions about the risks of using surgery to modify the face. The author—who herself lives with prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, and leads the Interface project, dedicated to studying the history and ethics of face transplants—is uniquely situated to document this subject. She encourages the reader to speculate about where she falls on the range between face-blind and those with “super-recognition”—individuals who can “apparently recognize 80 percent of the faces they have seen once before,” and she sensitively explores the pros and cons of the controversial face-transplant procedure, based on extensive interviews with those who have received them.

You won’t look in the mirror the same way again.