Justin Not Bieber: Masquerades

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask - Victor Hugo

Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, Anastasia, 1994

Edward Steichen

Pierre Molinier, Claire et Alain

A French Satire (ca. 1810)

"It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five." (Thomas Carlyle)

My aunt Betty

Gregorio Sciltian, Maskerade, 1930

Cesare Sofianopulo, Maschere, 1930

Hannah Höch, The Staircase, 1926

Charley Toorop, Clown in front of the ruins of Rotterdam, 1945

Paul Cadmus, Mask and False Noses, n.d.

Anonymous, Chain screens on steel helmet to protect soldiers' eyes from fragments of shell, rock, etc.; manufactured by E. J. Codd Company, Baltimore, Maryland, 1918

Unknown Photographer, 1940s
World War II - Like girls from Mars are the "top women" in the blast furnace department at U.S. Steel's Gary, Indiana Works. Their job is to clean up at regular intervals around the tops of Gary Works' twelve blast furnaces. As a safety precaution, the girls wear oxygen masks while they are doing the clean-up job.

Margaret Bourke-White, Closeup portrait of Russian iron puddler w. glasses parked over his brow, at the "Red October" Rolling Mills, Stalingrad 1931

Barthel Gilles, Self-Portrait with Gas Mask, 1930

Otto Dix, Stormtroopers during a Gas Attack, 1924

This etching seems to have been designed especially to illustrate the passage where another painter, Jacques-Emile Blanche, recounts what he saw in March 1916: "Today", he wrote in his diary, "we went down into these troglodyte dwellings where warring monks, officers aged between 50 and 60, good men who have bidden farewell to worldly things, did their 'dirty work' with the ingenuous, childish and methodical spirit of Benedictine monks. We saw the monstrous, grotesque masks of the gas masks, those fearsome goggled snouts which men with such paternal, such gentle faces, so ill-fitted for war, adjust with all the care demanded by the insidious poison."

Madame Yevonde, All Crisis, 1939

Ralph Crane, Man wearing a WWII Russian helmet and gas mask during the anti-election demonstrations in front of the City Hall, San Francisco, 1968

Marie Hansen, Rows of WACS after having put on their gas masks for training drill; Fort Des Moines, 1942

Chris Steele-Perkins, Virtual Reality helmets. Tokyo motor show, 1999

"My sister Eva B. She says Facebook is for retarded people." - Manfred von Richthofen

Pink Stormtrooper protester at the G20 Summit

Rudolf Wacker, Ilse Wacker with Mask, 1925

Franz M. Jansen, Masken, 1925

Rogerio Reis, Surfistas de Trem (Train Surfers), 1995

Homer Sykes, Two young IRA "Hoods" with petrol bombs, 1980
Thanks to http://www.homersykes.com/

Subcommandante Marcos

Thomas D. Mcavoy, 1956
Dutch beekeeper, Gerrit Norsselman wearing a heavy cotton cloth hood with a pipe pertruding through the facial screen using the smoke to help keep the bees at a safe distance.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Jeune femme à la voilette

Louis Anquetin, Woman with Veil, 1890s

Gustaf van de Woestyne (1881-1947), Les deux printemps

Otto Dix, Lady with Mink and Veil, 1920

Viscount Hastings, Untitled, 1934

Maria Lassnig, Couple, 2005

Too late

John Heartfield, 1930
Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf: Away with These Stultifying Bandages!

McQuarrie, 1943
Eyes of Censorship - peering through paper counter-stamped by U.S. Censors Offices, Algiers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Aveu

Paul Outerbridge, Self-Portrait, 1927

Berenice Abbott, James Joyce, 1926

"Jaun after he had in the first place doffed a hat with a reinforced crown and bowed to all the others in that chorus of praise of goodwill girls on their best beehiviour who all they were girls all rushing sowarmly for the post as buzzy as sie could bie to read his kisshands, kittering all about, rushing and making a tremendous girlsfuss over him pellmale, their jeune premier and his rosyposy smile, mussing his frizzy hair and the golliwog curls of him."