Face: A Visual Odyssey

by Jessica Helfand

An elaborately illustrated A to Z of the face, from historical mugshots to Instagram posts.

By turns alarming and awe-inspiring, Face offers up an elaborately illustrated A to Z—from the didactic anthropometry of the late-nineteenth century to the selfie-obsessed zeitgeist of the twenty-first.

Jessica Helfand looks at the cultural significance of the face through a critical lens, both as social currency and as palimpsest of history. Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, she examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes. From vintage advertisements for a “nose adjuster” to contemporary artists who reconsider the visual construction of race, Face delivers an intimate yet kaleidoscopic adventure while posing universal questions about identity.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Sociology

280 pages, Hardcover

Published November 12, 2019

About the author

Jessica Helfand is a designer, artist, and writer. Educated at Yale University, where she has taught for more than twenty years, she is a cofounder of Design Observer and the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism. The first Henry Wolf Resident at the American Academy in Rome, Helfand has been a Director's Guest at the Civitella Foundation and a fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation. She will be the artist in residence at the California Institute of Technology in the winter of 2020.

Reviews

[Mike Errico · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first thing I thought when I heard about this book was, “finally, someone is going to deconstruct the insanity behind the selfie and what it’s doing to our brains (it can’t be good, can it?), but that turned out to be just one part of a sweeping history of identity, as seen through our relationship to what could be our most culturally loaded body part (and wow, that’s saying a lot). Throughout, Helfand’s insights are accompanied by gorgeous photographic examples, and the two elements dialogue, explaining each other the way a fantastic lecture might. It’s been on my coffee table for a couple weeks and has already hijacked two conversations, diverting them toward Narcissus, or creepy facial recognition software, or celebrity plastic surgery, or, well...ourselves.

[Andrea Tejeda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Si no se nos olvida que este libro es un catálogo de conceptos en relación al rostro, Vale mucho la pena. Nos brinda un repertorio amplio de términos, teóricos, artistas, científicos, etc etc en relación al entendimiento de la cara pero sin profundizar.