Cosmic Surgery

Cosmic Surgery (2016) imagines cosmetic surgery rerouted through geometry: British-based photographer Alma Haser (b. 1989) folds her own portrait sitters into faceted origami masks built from photographs of their own features, so that eyes, lips, and cheekbones multiply across the folded planes of a paper polyhedron fixed to the face.

The self-published hardcover collects portraits from a project Haser began in 2013, photographing each sitter twice &mdash once straight, once concealed beneath a folded paper construction printed with details from the same shoot &mdash so that cubist multiplication stands in for the "cosmetic" transformation the title puns on (Haser, who is dyslexic, coined it by misspeaking "cosmetic surgery"). This second edition, funded through a 2016 Kickstarter and designed by Emily Macaulay of Stanley/Barker, runs 60 pages plus inserted booklets of speculative pseudo-medical text by science writer Piers Bizony describing the procedure's features and benefits the hardcover is foil-embossed on cover, spine, and back, in a signed edition of 600.

Haser studied photography at Nottingham Trent University, where she also took up origami, graduating in 2010 she works across analogue paper-folding, collage, and rephotography to push flat portraiture toward sculpture. Cosmic Surgery won the Magenta Foundation's Bright Spark Award and remains her best-known monograph, anchoring a body of work that continued with the twin-portrait jigsaws of Within 15 Minutes and the paper-and-plant hybrids of her ongoing Plant series.