les masques

One day in French class we read about Marie Antoinette (in French) and learned that when she and her husband the King were guillotined during the Revolution, a certain Madame Tussaud took their heads (among others) and made death masks which she then cast in wax. Her likenesses of these unfortunates are the only way we know now what they looked like. This story prompted our professor to suggest that perhaps we would like to have living masks of our faces and, not to worry, he'd been doing this sort of thing to his students successfully for many decades. A few brave hands went up. Fortunately, I was assigned as official photographer - keeping me slightly distant from the actual process. The mask above is the face of a handsome young man. Eventually it will be filled with plaster of paris and the crude preliminary likeness will be discarded. The photo is of the inside of the mask and appears convex instead of concave which is what it was. I'm told that this mystery is due to something called reversal of figure-ground and if I had studied art I'd know that. To me, it resembles a film negative in the way shadows play over the details. One does wonder though, what was Madame T thinking? Carting away those bloody heads! Mon dieu!

Lorraine