What immediately jumped to mind, besides how blown out the highlights are, is that there was an awful lot of darkness behind him. It occurred to me that he wouldn't be as noticeably washed out if I adjusted the contrast behind him.
I duplicated the layer, then created a layer mask with the inverse greyscale of the layer. That masks out the brightest areas and lets me adjust only the darkest. Once I did that, I played with the curves to increase the contrast across the darkest part of the histogram and brought up the exposure considerably without changing him. Then I applied selective sharpening.
Of course, as soon as I did that, I unwittingly uncovered the reason he was making that face:
When will men learn not to play god?
BTW if you want to just see the exposure adjustments:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3573/...24a11977_o.jpg