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.

280 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 18, 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

[Vinicius Lima · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book gets better as you read it! It’s a true call for humanity in design and in our daily actions and decisions. Spanning an A-Z organization, the book is rich with examples and bridges the past to the future. Could not say better things about this. Jessica Helfand did an outstanding job!