Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Twice Told Tuesday - Faces Out Of Register


Twice Told Tuesday features a photography related article reprinted from
my collection of old photography books, magazines, and newspapers.

Oh those spectacles! Not only do they create havoc with photographers, but it seems the spectacle-makers must contend with the fact that there are no perfect faces. Except perhaps those of the French. Oh, and they obviously didn't have Al Jazeera to watch.


FACES OUT OF REGISTER
The Amateur Photographer & Photography
April 28th 1926


One rather amusing contribution to the Optical Convention brought out a minor worry of the spectacle-maker - namely, the fitting of glasses to features which are non-symmetrical. Its author Mr. Harry L. Taylor, declared that four males out of five have irregular features, different on one side of the face from what they are on the other.

In females, the "faultily faultless" face is more often found, and where the race has been trained to hide the emotions and to cultivate a certain sphinx-like impassiveness, as amongst the Arabs, irregularities are scarcely ever met with.

But generally, among men, the right eye is farther from the nose than the left, and it is, moreover, the exception to find a nose which is straight.


There are also differences between nationalities which seem to depend upon the degree to which the eyes are used in expression as compared with the other portions of the face.

The labial character of speech, combined with the less expressive ocular regions, noticeable in the French, apparently has less effect in producing facial irregularity than a harsher tone, combined with greater ocular expressiveness, as characterises our own people.




But painters and sculptors appear to be under a stringent necessity to make faces symmetrical, and perhaps that is why they so seldom produce a likeness.

Source:

Unknown, "Faces Out Of Register" The Amateur Photographer & Photography, Aptil 1926, 505.

Photographs:

Man With Bowler and Pince Nez (CDV). Not researched. Privately held by the footnoteMaven, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE,] Preston, Washington. 2008.

Young Man With Pince Nez (CDV). Not researched. Privately held by the footnoteMaven, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE,] Preston, Washington. 2008.

1 Comments:

Blogger Lidian said...

The young man with the pince nez has got great hair!

Don't know about his ocular expressiveness though...

September 2, 2008 at 7:18 AM  

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