Sage Sohier’s *About Face* (Columbia College Chicago Press, 2012) is a portrait book centered on people living with varying degrees of facial paralysis. The condition may affect one side of the face and can arise from Bell’s palsy, tumors, strokes, accidents, or congenital nerve damage. By placing these faces at the center of a photographic work, Sohier addresses portraiture through a subject for whom expression—so often treated as an effortless measure of identity and emotion—has become physically uncertain.

The photographs were made in a Boston clinic offering physical therapy, Botox treatments, and, in some cases, surgery. Sohier’s approach is documentary but not detached: she photographs patients before treatment and sometimes follows their progress, recording the gradual return of the ability to smile, speak, and eat. The book therefore holds two temporalities together—the stillness of the portrait and the changes that occur across treatment—while allowing hope and excitement to appear without reducing the subjects to medical case studies.

Its significance lies in this rethinking of the face as both social image and bodily experience. The work also unsettles the everyday assumption that people can freely command the full range of facial expressions and the emotions those expressions communicate. Sohier’s portraits ask what is being read when expression is limited, and how much conventional portraiture depends on an idea of facial perfection. For collectors interested in contemporary documentary portraiture, disability and representation, or the expressive possibilities of the photobook, *About Face* offers a focused and humane study. The 83-page English-language hardcover, identified by ISBN-13 9781935195368, presents a sustained body of work whose force comes from close attention rather than spectacle.