The Face: A Cultural History

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. (June)