Jessica Helhand’s incredible book Face: A Visual Odyssey is a kind of encylopedia of human faces as they have been represented and understood throughout various cultures and eras, from the nineteenth century up to the present day. Through an extraordinary catalogue of striking, diverse, mostly photographic images, Helfand poses a number of important questions about heredity, identity, the impact of science, photography, narcissism and mysticism on our understanding of what a face should or shouldn’t be. 

Helfand’s monumental visual diary of face-culture, past and present, is one of those rare books that teaches us something vital about ourselves, and is testimony to the wild beauty, and the obsessive strangeness, of our species. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐