Review: Faces

Faces by David Goodman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This book is a visual exploration of a single subject across many media. While there are many conventional artistic media, Miller & Goodman seem to be in their element using found objects. The design engaged me, and an editor somewhere allowed the artists to make some fun book-making choices: flexible cloth cover; translucent paper in a couple of places; fuzzy texture on one page. The book was originally put out by the Tate Gallery.

I found it annoying that Miller & Goodman thought they had to try to rhyme the words. The book was primarily visual, and I thought by and large that the words were distracting (was this the hand of an editor, or the choice of the authors?). I would have preferred this to be a wordless picture book, with some kind of short guide at the end (or even at an internet link) about how to use some of the media.

Finding faces is one of the evolutionary facts of visual perception. Yarbus' [b:Eye Movements and Vision|8485179|Eye Movements and Vision|A.L. Yarbus|/assets/nocover/60x80.png|13350419] eye movement studies in the former Soviet Union showed how people's eyes track repeatedly and quickly to anything that resembles a face. And Bower's Primer of Infant Development [b:A Primer Of Infant Development|4294315|A Primer Of Infant Development|T.G.R. Bower|/assets/nocover/60x80.png|4341898] discusses studies where infants only a few days old focused and tracked two simple 'eye' dots on paper where they wouldn't register many other things. Most of us have 'found' faces in odd places, such as in the dirt, in the bark of a tree, in the pattern on a carpet or linoleum floor.

Interesting note about the peritext: After the copyright it says, "The moral rights of the authors have been asserted." I wondered what that meant, so I found that Moral Rights are regularly attached to art works in Europe, separate from copyright--go check it out on Wikipedia (Moral Rights). Artistic integrity is a separate legal concept from the right to reproduce a work.




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