Paperbacks: Face, by William A Ewing

Christopher Hirst
Friday 25 July 2008 00:00 BST
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Ranging from the painstaking artifice of Thai transvestites to Alison Jackson's fake shot of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed look-alikes with child, this collection of photographic portraits is a powerful reminder of our emotional investment in the face.

Many of the images are jarring. This is only to be expected with the surgically implanted "horns" of the French artist Orian or Hee Jin Kang's portrait of a lip-glossed mouth surrounded by a sprouting beard. But one of the most disturbing pictures in the book is the literally defaced photograph of a Bosnian family found when they returned to their Serb-occupied house in Sarajevo.

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