In The Face: A Cultural History, historian Fay Bound Alberti asks what our faces really say about us. The result is an elegant history that moves from the ancient Greeks through Renaissance portraiture to the arrival of mirrors, Instagram filters and face transplants, investigating the politics of how we understand ourselves and judge one another.
Bound Alberti’s interest is more than academic. In her forties, five years into researching faces, she was diagnosed with prosopagnosia, or “face-blindness”.
