[Forehead]

1929

Not on view

In print media between the World Wars, the close-up reigned. Lips beckoned and eyes batted across the pages of magazines, where photographs of facial features—desirable and not—were silhouetted, spliced, and magnified to unlikely scale. The phenomenon tracked closely with fads for physiognomy and other dubious forms of facial analysis, which Paul Edmund Hahn here lampoons. For the German illustrated monthly UHU, he mapped "The Face as Landscape" in photographs of weathered brows and cavernous nostrils made at unsparing range. A wry accompanying text classified their geography. Nodding at the camera’s dual capacities to distort and reveal, UHU ran a variant of this forehead view with two captions: "Autumnal landscape of dunes, or: The hair becomes thinner."

Artwork Details

Overview

Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

Provenance

Title: [Forehead]
Artist: Paul Edmund Hahn (German, 1897–1960)
Date: 1929
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: 15.8 x 20.5 cm (6 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Object Number: 1987.1100.55
Curatorial Department: Photographs

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