The Face
A Cultural History
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
'Equal parts gripping and scholarly... a timely book that gets to the heart of contemporary society' Katy Hessel, Sunday Times
'Utterly fascinating, beautifully written, scholarly yet entertaining' Joanna Lumley
A pioneering study into how we interpret faces and what they reveal about us, from a world-renowned cultural historian
What’s in a face?
The face is the only part of the body where all the senses come together and, over the course of human history, has come to represent who we are as individuals. We unlock our phones with facial recognition; we have our faces stamped in our passports; and although our faces may change over the course of our lives – whether through ageing, accident, illness or lifestyle – they remain a foundational marker of identity.
In The Face, cultural historian Fay Bound-Alberti explores the ways humans have interpreted faces and how they have shaped our ideas of morality, social hierarchy, psychology and so much more, revealing some of the biases that inform our everyday lives. She charts how new technologies and cultural innovations have transformed our conception of selfhood over time – from the growth of portraiture in the Renaissance and the mass production of mirrors and photography in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first century developments, such as digital avatars and face transplants.
Bringing together a wealth of fascinating research, interviews and illuminating personal narratives, Bound-Alberti probes beneath the surface to ask what our faces really say about us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Bound-Alberti (A Biography of Loneliness) offers a stimulating reconsideration of the long-standing role of the face as a perceived window into a person's inner substance. Arguing that this isn't a natural idea, but a culturally constructed one, she begins with prehistoric cave paintings, noting that, in those artworks, it was animal faces that were realistically portrayed while the humans remained highly abstract. From there she traces the history of the face to its present malleable state (both via online face-tuning and real-world plastic surgery), along the way spotlighting moments when new tech coincided with changes in ideas about what the face reveals about a person. Advances in the art of portraiture during the Renaissance, for example, laid the groundwork for the notion of "facehood"—i.e., "the idea that a single, unique face equates with an individual, named person," and thus that faces can be used as tools for identification. Later, the emergence of photography "democratized" facehood, but also opened new avenues for surveillance. Bound-Alberti's roving narrative touches on everything from eugenics to makeup to the first selfie (taken in 1839 by Philadelphian Robert Cornelius, who could not have foreseen that generations later there would be a perennial online debate about his relative "hotness"). It makes for a fun and thought-provoking rumination on what it means to take each other at face value.
