Alex Queral Sculpts Famous Faces from Phone Books

Here’s an artist who has captured some of the world’s most iconic faces—from Barack Obama to Bob Dylan—using the rest of humanity as his clay. Alex Queral, a 51-year-old sculptor from Philadelphia, harvests discarded old phone books and carves famous faces from their pages. He’s created two a month for the past fourteen years by sketching the face as a template and then painstakingly slicing through the thousands of paper-thin pages to create a sculpture. “Nearing the end of the carving and then suddenly having it ruined by a careless cut can be pretty crushing.” And if a page is out of place, “You have to start all over again.”