Kelly has a fascinating conversation with King’s College London professor Fay Bound-Alberti about her compelling new book, “The Face: A Cultural History.” 

In modern times, we take our relationship with the human face for granted, as if it’s always been a representation of us as people. But that wasn’t always the case. 

“My argument really is that it’s only as we’ve had more diverse urbanized anonymous populations; at the same time as we’ve had a more need to control those populations and to develop bureaucracy around them and the technologies that make that possible, like mirrors and cameras, that we are so obsessed with a single person being a single face. And so there’s identity and the face becoming completely entangled. But if you think that for most of history, people didn’t even see themselves in a mirror, let alone have a picture of themselves in their passport, it says something about this changing importance of the face in history. And I’ve even called it Facehood, this kind of sense that personhood needs to have a human face.” 

There is a strong sense of ‘me-search” in this book which is, I’m guessing, how you found yourself researching this field.” 

“How I became interested? Well, weirdly enough, I got interested initially through the lens of face transplants. And I thought, ‘Well, how can you transplant a face when it’s supposedly the kind of essence of a single person and their individuality?’ And it was only while doing the research that I realized I have prosopagnosia or face blindness. So, I’ve never really been able to recognize people purely by their faces. But I didn’t realize that it was a thing. I didn’t even really think about prosopagnosia. And in a sense, that’s part of the story that I’m telling because the desire to know a face, and the presumption that you must in order to have a normal brain, is only really important because we start identifying people by their faces.” 

What’s sobering is to recognize that overtime, we’ve allowed our ideas about what the face represents to almost blind us to our own bias. 

“We’ve taken it for granted in the same way that we roll out facial recognition systems that identify people, even though we know it’s fundamentally flawed. We just presume it must make sense, it must work, it must be the best way of knowing a person. And it’s not so much that I have a problem with that, or I think that faces don’t tell us things, it’s more let’s think about why this has become so important and what are the implications. And the implications are often that people are valued in hierarchies based on what they look like, whether that’s to do with their age or ethnicity and increasingly facial difference as well, which is something that I work a lot on in the book.” 

Photo Credit: Alastair Hilton