On Prosopagnosia

Oh, hey, look, it is an opportunity to explain how people look to me!

As I've mentioned before, I have prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. I think it's hard for people who don't have it to understand what that means. I mean, Hannibal had a character who had it, and tried to replicate the effect by always blurring everyone's faces whenever they appeared from that character's point of view, which is entirely wrong. "Face-blindness" doesn't mean I can't see faces, I can see faces just fine. They just don't make more of an impression on me than anything else I see-- trees, furniture, hands, etc. I think that most people with a functioning fusiform gyrus don't realize when you're using it, don't realize that you perceive faces differently from how you perceive everything else.

But here is an incredibly useful visual aid. This artist, Sandro Miller, has recreated iconic portraits with John Malkovich as the subject.

So: I can tell that John Malkovich is not Che Guevara (I think because the photo quality is too good) or Marilyn Monroe, or probably Arbus' identical twins, though I don't know the original photo. But the rest of them, I would instantly identify as whoever they're labeled as. They have all the right cues-- hair, clothing, facial expression, background-- that would tell me who they are, plus their names are helpfully at the bottom of the photo. So I would have no reason to think that they are John Malkovich. They don't look like John Malkovich.

I'm curious-- can other people identify him from these pictures?

--R