Bruce Gilden - Face - 2015

Face – Bruce Gilden
Photo book | Published in 2015 | 104 pages | English
Face is an intense portrait book by the American street photographer Bruce Gilden, known for his extremely direct style in which he captures subjects up close with a built-in flash. Gilden is a Magnum photographer who for decades roamed cities like New York to find and photograph 'characters' — people with a striking presence.

What the book shows
In Face, Gilden does not focus on urban scenes or contexts, but almost exclusively on close-up portraits of faces. These are tightly cropped and literally reveal every detail of the skin, expression, and character of the portrayed subject — teeth, stubble, scars, looks — without any embellishment or aesthetic smoothing.

Characteristic of this work

Intense closeness: The portraits are shot extremely close, which gives a sense of confrontation and intimacy.
Collaborative approach: Unlike Gilden’s classic street photography, in which he photographs without permission, the portraits in Face are created with the subjects’ consent and feel like a shared gaze toward the camera.
Character for beauty: Gilden does not seek conventional beauty, but the raw humanity and honesty behind the face; what some regard as 'unglamorous' or even uncomfortable, he presents as authentic life.
Thematic load

The book toys with ideas about how we portray faces and people in images today—especially through social media and selfies that are polished and filtered—versus how real people look without filters. Gilden challenges the viewer to look beyond beauty ideals and to acknowledge the complexity of real faces.
The book is in good condition.