Untitled No.122 1983 Colour photograph 220 x 146.7 cm
Notes:
The Portrait in Photography
Pg 101
- The portrait in Photography is one of the most problematic areas of photographic practice.
- …. ‘at virtually every level, and within every context the portrait photograph is fraught with ambiguity. And part of this ambiguity relates to the question of what, and who, is being photographed.
- In what sense can a literal image express the inner world and being of an individual before the camera? From the inception of the portrait photograph photographers have been concerned to expresses in the single image and assumed ‘inner’ being. Thus, ‘character revelation is the essence of good portraiture’.
Pg 102
- The portrait photograph is, then, the site of a complex series of interactions – aesthetic, cultural, ideological, sociological and psychological. In many ways it simultaneously represents the photographic image at its most obvious and yet at its most complex and problematic. As has been suggested, ‘The portrait is… a sign whose purpose is both the description of an individual and the inscription of social identity’. The portrait photograph hovers between opposing terms of meaning – a constant dialectic of significance in which the problem of individual status and self is held.
- Part of the problem, of course, lies in the question of what constitutes a ‘portrait’ to begin with.
Pg 102-3
- At photography’s inception in the nineteenth century the portrait photograph was equated with oil painting, further encoding the dichotomy between the portrait in oils as an individual text and the photograph as a part of a populist and democratic form of representation.
Pg 103
- Superficially, at least, the photograph is directly opposed to portrait painting, and yet it is extraordinary how the portrait photograph remains encoded with the contexts of painting – hence the complexity and contradictions at the heart of any photograph of an individual.
- … but of a formal study and representation of an individual presence
Pg 104
- If the portrait photographer established a central role as the inspired artist, so operating rooms employed ’operators’
- The daguerreotype, though, was hardly the medium to probe or to suggest a personality. It was overwhelmingly formal…
Pg 106
- They declare implicitly the extent to which any ‘portrait’ is a construction, an advertisement of the self – so obviously underlined by the way in which the cartes-de-visite became fashionable in nineteenth century Paris as the mark of identity and social significance. As calling cards they asserted the reality and the presence of the absent personality
cartes-de-visite – a small photographic portrait of a person, mounted on a piece of card
Pg 109
- And consistently, the ‘portrait’ hovers between extremes: on the one hand the passport image, an identity card which stamps itself as an authoritative image; and on the other hand the studio portrait, which is offered as a study – the realisation of the photographers definitive attempt to reveal an interior and enigmatic personality
Pg 111
- …denigrating any literal representation as part of a surface response which ignores the complex psychological inner space in which the self is held. Cubism and Surrealism, like Dadaism and Expressionism, abandoned literal forms of representation in their attempts to establish a visual picturing of an internal as much as external complex of ‘being’ But which way did the portrait photographer.
Denigrating – criticize unfairly; disparage.
- Surrealist photographers such as Man Ray made the questioning of the ‘self’ and ‘identity’ basic to their photographic aesthetic, often producing extraordinary images which in many ways were frontrunners for the latter photographs of Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe
- But the paradox remains, for overwhelmingly the photograph insisted on the principle of representation and the depiction of space that modernism rejected. Perhaps this suggested the extent to which the photograph reflected a populist base – encoding the ‘snapshot’ into its basis as a democratic art form.
- In that sense, and for all its limitations, the photographic portrait inscribes into its meaning precisely that play between internal and external worlds that remains one of the great subjects of the nineteenth century – rather than the twentieth century novel.
- Above all, the great portrait photographs simultaneously declares identity as they probe the terms of definition.
- … complex typologies of significance – interacting sets of social and cultural codes – by which each image is given meaning.
Typologies – a classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences; the study and interpretation of types and symbols, originally especially in the Bible.
Pg 113
- …extent to which the camera has capacity to define a personal history within the context of other frames of reference.
- Sander: dedicated to the social picturing of the individual.
Mapplethorpe; Self-Portrait, 1971
Pg 117
- Mapplethorpe: Thee photographic portraits place themselves within a larger context of gender and identity, but as photographs they insist upon themselves as a part of continuing metamorphosis in which a single personality does not so much change as reject the codes through which identity, private as much as public, is assumed, determined, and declared.
Pg 117-19
- Sherman: … she embarked on an exhaustive visual analysis of the very meaning of identity in terms of its significance as an Her pictures feature both social and sexual stereotypes fed by a consistent sense of individual ambiguity and self-questioning.
Pg 119
- In the end there is no literal reality. All is construction and myth and, ultimately, self-enclosed fantasy
- Sherman’s images have a dangerous precocity.
Precocity – precocity is a noun that means intelligence achieved far ahead of normal development.