The New Physiognomy

A fascinating new study of the face, form, and history of expression.

Advances in facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and other technologies provoke urgent ethical questions about facial expressivity and how we interpret it. In The New Physiognomy, Rochelle Rives roots contemporary facial dilemmas in a more expansive timeline of modernist engagements with the face to argue that facial ambiguity is essential to how we value other people.

Beginning with nineteenth-century caricatures of Oscar Wilde's face, Rives reasons that modernist modes of reading the face perceived it as a manifestation of both biologically determined traits and scripted forms of personality. Considering faces such as sculptures of great poets, portraits of facially wounded World War I soldiers, W.H. Auden's aging face, and Cindy Sherman's recent photographic self-portraits, Rives reframes how to read modernist works by Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad, Mina Loy, Henry Tonks, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Such examples reveal connections between our specific methods of inquiry in the humanities and other scientific and political modes of understanding humans, challenging the work of contemporary reading technologies—from surface reading to facial recognition technology—that privilege accuracy and objectivity. With a multidisciplinary approach, The New Physiognomy refutes prevailing assumptions about form, inviting us to reconsider how we engage with the language, images, and faces of others. This groundbreaking exploration of modernist representations reshapes our understanding of the complexities of the human face in an increasingly technologically driven world.