Nancy Burson’s *Faces* was published by Twin Palms Publishers in October 1993. For several years Burson photographed children with craniofacial disorders, working with a plastic Diana camera that imparts an ethereal and almost spiritual quality to her subjects. The publisher describes these children as camera-shy, and notes that both they and the artist began to see themselves and each other differently through the ongoing photographic experience, coming to understand, perhaps better than most, what beauty must be if our dreams and dignity are to survive. The book is a hardcover volume of 72 pages, measuring 8 by 8 inches, with 45 gravure plates.
The project’s distinguishing condition is its duration and its instrument. The Diana is a simple plastic camera, and its optical character is inseparable from the look of the pictures; the publisher treats that quality as central rather than incidental. The subjects are children with craniofacial conditions, a group that public imagery has often handled as spectacle. Here the photographs are presented as portraits made over years, in which the children’s initial reticence before the camera gives way to a changed way of seeing themselves and one another.
The book’s stated concern is beauty and dignity. In the publisher’s framing, the long collaboration between Burson and the children produced an understanding of what beauty must be in order that dreams and dignity may survive. That claim is the publisher’s own description of the work, not an external critical judgment. What the book documents is a sustained photographic relationship, reproduced across 45 gravure plates in a compact square format.
*Faces* is a 1993 Twin Palms title, currently listed by the publisher as out of print. Its creator is Nancy Burson, credited as photographer; the supplied catalogue and the exact-ISBN record name no other contributors. The edition is hardcover, in English, with the publisher’s page count of 72 pages preferred over the aggregator’s stated 62. Within that scope, the book records a series made with the same modest camera and the same group of children over several years.
