Arne Svenson’s Unspeaking Likeness is a photographic series of forensic facial reconstruction sculptures—modeled faces made of clay or plaster. The publisher notes that investigators may request such a reconstruction shortly after an unidentified corpse, or part of one, is found, to aid in victim identification. The book was published by Twin Palms Publishers in June 2016 as a hardcover: 108 pages, eleven by fourteen inches, with forty-nine duotone plates and an essay by William T. Vollmann.

The photographs are not portraits of people but images of objects made to stand in for people. A reconstruction serves an identification process, yet it is not a direct photographic record of the person whose identity is being sought. Svenson photographs the sculptures as sculptures, so that surface and form are what the plates describe. The interest of the series lies in this distance: a likeness produced for practical purposes, presented as an object to be looked at.

Twin Palms’s large-format presentation suits the work. The duotone plates render the reconstructions in a controlled tonal range, and the scale allows the faces to be examined closely. Vollmann’s essay, quoted in the publisher’s description, asks what remains when the flesh goes and why the living recoil from that evidence. These questions bring a literary response into the reader’s encounter with the photographed objects.

For a reader, the project raises a question about how recognition works. A constructed likeness is intended to help someone identify an absent person, while a photograph gives that likeness another form of visibility. The book brings these stages together without making the sculpture equivalent to the person it represents. Looking at the faces can therefore involve both attention to a physical object and awareness of the missing life toward which it points.