On a roof terrace in Tel Aviv in 1936 the photographer and cameraman Helmar Lerski realised a work that for him represents the sum of his artistic work as a photographer of light: of a single young man, the building technician Leo Uschatz, he made around 140 photographic close-ups of the face. Using numerous mirrors he transformed his model’s physiognomy into ever new sculptural landscapes. Against the conventional idea of the portrait that seeks to fathom the identity of the sitter, the face in Lerski’s photographs becomes a canvas onto which he projects the facial expressions of the silent-film era, thus drawing up a catalogue of its affects.