Ghost in the shell : photography and the human soul, 1850-2000 : essays on camera portraiture / Robert A. Sobieszek.

"In this book Sobieszek presents a wide-ranging study of the camera portrait as a reflection and catalyst of cultural beliefs about human nature. He demonstrates that photographed faces over the past 150 years - whether on silver plates, in fashion shots, or in video stills - raise questions of essence and appearance that also lie behind activities as varied as philosophy, fiction, painting, psychiatry, film, forensics, anthropology, masquerade, gender studies, and plastic surgery.".

"The book's three essays explore traditional, modern, and postmodern approaches to the camera portrait. "'Gymnastics of the Soul': The Clinical Aesthetics of Duchenne de Boulogne" investigates the nineteenth-century certainty that, in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, "the outer person is a picture of the inner." This belief was pursued in physiognomy, phrenology, and pathognomy, popular pseudosciences of the day that were the culmination of a long tradition including the work of Giambauista della Porta, Charles Le Brun, and Johann Kaspar Lavater. Modernism brought an apparent end to these pursuits through a new awareness of the subjectivity inherent in the use of the camera.

In "'Tolerances of the Human Face': The Affectless Surfaces of Andy Warhol," the author places Warhol's photo-silkscreened portraits in the modern contexts of social and anthropological classification and the symbolism of fame, but suggests that physiognomy has not been entirely silenced. Finally, "'Abstract Machines of Faciality': The Dramaturgical Identities of Cindy Sherman" explores the theatrical aspects of portraiture, tracing a continuum that links Sherman's work to the demonstrations of hysteria staged by the nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Surrealist masks, performance art, and the use of schizophrenia and multiple selves as metaphors for the postmodern human condition.".

"The photographs collected here - works by Diane Arbus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Curtis, Salvador Dali, Dorothea Lange, Annie Leibowitz, Bruce Nauman, Orlan, William Parker, Irving Penn, Lucas Samaras, Edward Weston, and many others - show how vividly the photographic arts have kept up with the motions of the human soul and contributed to our perception of being."--BOOK JACKET.

Los Angeles : Los Angeles County Museum of Art ; Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press, [1999], ©1999.

322 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 29 cm

Published in conjunction with the exhibition ... held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 16, 1999-January 17, 2000.

Gymnastics of the soul: the clinical aesthetics of Duchenne de Boulogne -- Tolerances of the human face: the affectless surfaces of Andy Warhol -- Abstract machines of faciality: the dramaturgical identities of Cindy Sherman.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 302-314) and index.