Face
The New Photographic Portrait
William A. Ewing
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| ‘Beautiful … fascinating … all [the photos] are captivating in some way’ | | – Professional Photographer |
| ‘Endlessly fascinating … inspiring and reassuring’ | | – Image |
| ‘Seminal … both enlightening and interesting … This intriguing collection of portraits is inspiring for anyone wanting to explore and experiment with the exciting aspects of modern-day portraiture’ | | – Amateur Photography |
This groundbreaking publication announces the death of the conventional portrait.
In an age when we are bombarded with flawless images of youthful beauty, when rejuvenation is available through a jar of cream or a scalpel, it is no wonder that a new generation of artists and photographers are seeking to portray the face in new ways.
Through a variety of techniques, including computer manipulation, retouching, photomontage, appropriation of found imagery and methods of veiling and disguising, the artists present their provocative new portraits.
Replacing clarity with blur, the split-second with the elastic moment, reality with hyperreality, they question the notion of a fixed identity, of the face as ‘the window to the soul’, of what constitutes beauty, of faith in absolute photographic truth. This exciting new portraiture, with its focus on what is revealed rather than what is concealed, is curiously closer to portraiture of the nineteenth century than to that of the twentieth.
Whether Gillian Wearing’s masked self-portrait, Aziz + Cucher’s neutral façades, LawickMüller’s composite portrait of a couple, Cindy Sherman’s disquieting
disguises or Orlan’s disturbing experiments with cosmetic surgery, these faces demand our attention. Exploring bold new strategies of representation, the artists in this book present faces to the world that are sometimes alluring, sometimes touching, sometimes frightening, but never less than riveting.
William A. Ewing is Director of the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland, the world-renowned museum of photography. He is the author of more than a dozen books on diverse aspects of photography and the curator of a number of international exhibitions on the themes of the body and the face.
Nathalie Herschdorfer is an Associate Curator at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne. An art historian specializing in the history of photography, she has co-curated several major international photography exhibitions.
Also by William A. Ewing:
The Body: Photoworks of the Human Form
Love & Desire: Photoworks
The Century of the Body: 100 Photoworks 1900–2000
reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow |
|  |  | | | | ISBN 0500543216 | | ISBN-13 978-0500543214 | | | | 28.0 x 23.5 cm | | Hardback | | 240pp | | 260 illustrations, 165 in colour,95 in duotone | | First published 2006 | | | | £32.00 | | | |  | | | | 
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