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Automatic face recognition performance has been steadily improving over years of research, however it remains significantly affected by a number of factors such as illumination, pose, expression, resolution and other factors that can impact matching scores. The focus of this paper is the pose problem which remains largely overlooked in most real-world applications. Specifically, we focus on one-to-one matching scenarios where a query face image of a random pose is matched against a set of gallery images. We propose a method that relies on two fundamental components: (a) A 3D modeling step to geometrically correct the viewpoint of the face. For this purpose, we extend a recent technique for efficient synthesis of 3D face models called 3D Generic Elastic Model. (b) A sparse feature extraction step using subspace modeling and ℓ1-minimization to induce pose-tolerance in coefficient space. This in return enables the synthesis of an equivalent frontal-looking face, which can be used towards recognition. We show significant performance improvements in verification rates compared to commercial matchers, and also demonstrate the resilience of the proposed method with respect to degrading input quality. We find that the proposed technique is able to match non-frontal images to other non-frontal images of varying angles.