During the First World War the male body “was intended to be mutilated”, as Joanna Bourke has remarked (1996). War provoked death, but also serious injuries and nervous disorders that transformed the bodies of the soldiers, whose limbs were lost or paralyzed. These disabled and mutilated bodies became a medical problem and a social concern, as scholars such as Bourke, Anna Carden-Coyne (2009) and Gabriel Koureas (2007) have discussed. This paper deals with the transformation of the knowledge of the male body operated in this period. It focuses on the impact that medical photographs had in the production and dissemination of that knowledge among civil population in France. In particular, it will examine the medical portraits that showed facial disfigurements and their progressive surgical reconstructions taken in French hospitals, especially in Val de Grâce (Paris). These portraits are interesting for many reasons. They were primarily taken with medical aims, as they allowed the study of the state of the patient and his evolution, as well as the planning of future surgeries. Moreover, these photographs constituted a medical archive of the cases treated, the techniques and the instruments used. But, once the war was over, these portraits entered the public sphere. For example, Doctor Gelly, a French Doctor who treated these patients, the so-called “gueules cassées” (“broken faces”), published illustrated pamphlets in the 20’s in order to arise compassion for these men among the French population. On the other hand, Ernst Friederich used these portraits of the broken faces in his pacifist Krieg dem Kriege! (1924) in order to denounce the barbarity of war. This paper argues that these photographs questioned the appearance and function of the male body in several ways. They constructed certain ideas about what a male body should be and look like that permeated the social discourses. In this way, this proposal will explore how these portraits travelled from the medical to the social context, and its consequences. Key questions will include the particular impact of photography in the construction of knowledge of the body, and the medical, aesthetics and social problems involved in facial mutilations and disfigurements.