The Absence of the Face

The face is the fundamental site of contact and connection. It encompasses two eyes (the windows of the soul and awareness) and a mouth (the semi-transparent window of desire, decision, and emotion). The face is a mirror that conveys the essence of the self (identity), a spectrum of emotions and insights, revealing the inner world to the outer through our eyes. The face is not merely a part of the body but in fact it houses the primary elements of communication: sight and speech. The face and the hand (touch and tactility) form the connection between us to the “other” and to the outside world. Much of what we understand and learn about the "other" is mediated by the expression of the face. For instance a child sees and hears before learning language, and the adults interpret each other’s facial movements and expressions. Yet sensory perceptions remain vague and obscure without language. That is why the artist strives to give form to what is unsayable and invisible. A valuable work of art gives expression to the ineffable, enriching experiences that lie beyond daily life.

On the first page of The Book of Forgetting, a photo-book by Farshid Azarang, we are faced with a full-frontal, blurred, and indistinct portrait of a person, governed by a logic of absence, the absence of the face. Through the temporality inherent in the photographic medium, the artist removes the face from the portrait’s subject, creating an image that on the one hand renders the mimetic language of portraiture and photography mute and stammering and on the other decenters the identity and the subject’s desire for immortality, granting instead centrality to the role of art and the artist’s desire. In doing so, it moves beyond existing reality toward an alternative, non-representational one, stripping the portrait of all conventional functions and imbuing it with an aesthetic role. Thus, the removal of the face from the subject highlights the tension between dualities: seeing and not seeing, inside and outside, self (individual) and other (society), image and reality, and—as Roland Barthes would say—"recognizing and finding"