Re-Introducing Identity, Prosthetics, (and Myself)

 More than fifteen years ago, University of Texas Press published my book, Making Faces, Playing God:  Identity and the Art of Transformation Makeup.  It was a hybrid project and an odd one.  I was motivated by a number of themes that had haunted me in my role as a philosophy writer and teacher.  One was the role of recognizability in gluing our social lives together.  If we each could change appearance radically at will, if we each had multiple clones, if we did not have (for the most part) unique faces, most aspects of life would be impossible.  A second theme spun off the first and was inspired by an anthropologist's claim that societies are even more likely to have masks than weapons, that the impetus behind carnival and Halloween is universal.  The idean is that deep, unacknowledged emotions of fear and desire underlie the fantasy of anonymity, of not being recognized.  We fear the disruption of losing our place with others, but we lust for the power and freedom of not being held responsible for what we do.  That is not to say, of course, that Halloween engages most of us, but rather that it stirs more feelings than we can identify, including revulsion.

Along with these ideas, I had always appreciated the work of prosthetic makeup artists as a special art form that was not fully appreciated as such.  And I used the book to explore the imagination, craft, and actual experience (for actors) of transformation, of wholly inhabiting the world as someone else.  In the course of writing Making Faces, I came to know many of the most gifted makeup artists, and most were generous with their work.  Their photos were featured in the book and formed the basis of three subsequent museum shows on transformational makeup.

My interest has not much waned in the last fifteen years, but publishers have narrowed their criteria and shrunken their lists.  I have spent most of my effort on my main professional work in law and philosophy, but at the same timeI would like to follow Making Faces with similar projects.  In the meantime, more and more astounding work is being done outside the US, the internet has facilitated access to this work for those willing to put in the effort and time, and I have accumulated a personal collection of over 50,000 photos that cover the evolution of the field.  

I plan to post and discuss the work of makeup artists (with their permission, of course) about once a month, mainly with a focus on artists who are not widely known and probably with a strong focus on age makeup.  Let's see where this goes.  Feel free to get in touch by email at 

thomas.morawetz@law.uconn.edu