In the opening pages of her book-length essay, Stranger Faces, Namwali Serpell challenges the reader: “Look at me,” she demands. She wants to know what we think about when faced with that imperative. Look at me. And she understands that when we read “me” we take it to mean her face. She goes on to ask the question “[W]hy is the face the seat of identity? What is it about the face—be it from the point of view of biology, neurology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology—that yields that cliche ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’?” Look at me means look at my face. This is a place of identity, truth, emotions, humanness. But it wasn’t always this way, and the extent to which the face represents these things has changed and deepened over time.
The idea of the face, what it represents on a personal and societal level, is one that feels often overlooked, or taken for granted. Faces, after all, are ubiquitous. We all have them, we all study our own—probably too much. But how often do we think about the notion of “facehood,” a term coined by Fay Bound-Alberti in her book The Face: A Cultural History. The Face is a well-researched, yet conversational, interrogation of how the idea and understanding of the face has evolved over time. The book runs through the historical evolution of the face, how new technology expands and transforms the face’s meaning, how discredited ideas like eugenics use the face to judge morality and establish social status, race and gender, and how these ideas are still active in our society today.
Throughout The Face, Bound-Alberti shows a keen eye for how history and technology shaped, and continues to shape, and reshape, the idea of what a face is and how it is used. In an early chapter, titled “Portrayed,” she writes about how Medieval portraits were used and how important they were: “Formal portraits were few and far between and they were intended to show a person how they wished to be remembered over multiple generations. This is very different from our ‘selfie’ culture in which images are easy to produce, reproduce, and disseminate. We might capture a moment, but seldom for posterity.”
The point of how formal portraiture worked in Medieval times, as opposed to a selfie, is well taken. The criticism of our current image culture recalls Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in the sense that images have lost a kind of aura/importance over time and through the use of ever-changing technology. One could quibble with what seems like a dismissal of the selfie (especially with what Bound-Alberti includes later in the book) and its connection, or lack thereof, to posterity. As Bound-Alberti goes on to explain, ever since those portraits in Medieval times, painters and subjects were trying to capture individual identities, and define what a face means (and what it is worth). A selfie is no different, often, in how the subject intends its use. The selfie face and the meticulously painted portrait are both crafted and constructed, their meanings shaped and deployed for specific purposes.
It is worth noting the lens through which Bound-Alberti is viewing the face (the cultural construct of). Bound-Alberti has prosopagnosia, or face blindness (which she occasionally reminds us of). She illustrates this with an anecdote of being lost at a beach during her childhood and not being able to recognize her mother. People with face blindness have trouble discriminating between faces, making it difficult to form relationships both personal and professional. It’s odd to say that this may lend Bound-Alberti a sense of credibility. Given the weight the face has been given—rightly or wrongly—in terms of identity and personality (among other traits) not to mention the role it found itself playing in eugenics and racism more broadly, [her] Prosopagnosia offers a kind of objectivity. It also lends a sense of wonder to the book and allows us to see where her intellectual curiosity stems from.
The Face is more a survey than it is a polemic—its subtitle says as much. Bound-Alberti explores how the face became a sign of individuality and identity in the hands of portrait painters; how the advent of photography democratized the face; how cosmetic surgery sought to perfect the face; and how transplants further commodified it. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that “the face is meaning itself.” In his view, the surface of the face and what it means, or implies, are one and the same: the face signifies itself. But the face is its own special mystery. It’s the center of our identities, and it signals a social message. If we take the face at surface level, we miss so much. The meaning of a face “is only fully realized in and through our relationships—without the ability to communicate with others, in expressions, in speech, in sensation, the face is just a mask.” The Face leaves us thinking about the notion of facehood, challenging how assumptions (of others, of ourselves) are made, and how our faces are racialized, and gendered before we even speak.
NONFICTION
The Face: A Cultural History
By Fay Bound-Alberti
Grand Central Publishing
Published June 9, 2026
