There’s a power to faces.

Here in the Ivan Vazov National Library in Plovdiv — in a large, gallery like room — there are bookshelves and glass cabinets given over to biographies, histories, and catalogues in translation.

Even the names are transliterated into the beautiful — but opaque to me — Bulgarian script, so that the only familiar features are the medium (book) and the faces: Anne Hathaway, Al Pacino, John Cleese, Will Smith, Woody Allen; all gaze out from the covers of these artefacts.

There is a focus afforded by this limited comprehension. Unable to read even the titles, I look more closely at the faces and indulge that part of the imagination that dares to guess at what the person behind that now duplicated1 face was thinking in that moment.


  1. Susan Sontag describes photographs as creating a “duplicate world”, making us ”feel that the world is more available than it really is.”↩︎