| |
 |
| © Michal Chelbin |
| Natasha, Ukraine, 2005. Click photo to launch a slideshow of portraits. |
It's always been much easier for me to understand why photographers want to take pictures of people than why people want to have their pictures taken. For most of us, even the famous, it can be profoundly discomfiting to forfeit our power of self-deception, to put ourselves into the hands of a portraitist who has his or her own agenda. Richard Avedon once recalled that Henry Kissinger, a man used to authority as Richard Nixon's secretary of state, pleaded with him to "be kind to me" when he sat for a portrait. A master of realpolitik, Kissinger recognized an imbalance of power when he saw it.
The portrait in art comes with social, cultural, and psychological underpinnings that are complex and endlessly fascinating to contemplate. As a species, we have learned to understand others by reading their faces; it is one of the ways we bind ourselves together and protect ourselves from danger. In that regard, our interest in faces can be seen simply as an evolutionary fact.
The invention of photography changed that fact in astounding ways. It allowed us to see our own faces over the course of time. In an interview several years ago, the late Susan Sontag noted that "never before in human history did people have any idea of what they looked like as children. The rich commissioned [paintings] of their children, but the conventions of portraiture from the Renaissance through the 19th century were thoroughly determined by ideas about class and didn't give people a very reliable idea of what they had looked like."
The portrait, formal and otherwise, has been a staple of photography since the daguerreotype made it cheap and relatively easy to capture someone's likeness. The 19th-century French writer Charles Baudelaire lamented that the burgeoning photographic industry had become "the refuge of failed painters with too little talent." Photo historian Naomi Rosenblum explains that the daguerreotype portrait struck a particular chord in America. "In the conjunction of uncanny detail, artless yet intense expression, and naïve pose, Americans recognized a mirror of the national ethos that esteemed unvarnished truth and distrusted elegance and ostentation," she writes.
At later times during the history of photography, the portrait has had to share center stage with other genres, particularly throughout the last decades of the 20th century. But there is ample evidence that the interest in portraiture among photographers is stronger now than ever before. Several new books have focused on the portrait, none with as much clarity as Face: The New Photographic Portrait (Thames & Hudson, $50). Its author, William A. Ewing, the director of the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, notes that at the end of the 20th century it was not the face but the body that seemed to hold photography in thrall. "Bodies were beginning to be seriously reconfigured and reconstituted by scientists and engineers," he writes. "Imagemakers felt the need to keep pace." Body photography tended to avoid faces, which, as Ewing notes, "were distracting, too personal -- too sight-specific, as it were. Body photographers sought to make statements about the universal human condition, and showing faces inevitably subverted this goal." Today, in an era of what Ewing calls growing global uniformity, we may again be looking for the very specifics the face supplies. In a time of terrorism and war, we may be searching with keener interest for the human connections and clues to character that we have learned to discern from the face.
The portfolio on the following pages features new work from both established masters of the form and from a new generation of photographers, all of whom are using the portrait to ask questions about the modern world and to describe the faces of our time.
Any discussion about the modern portrait must begin with Annie Leibovitz, the best-known portraitist of our time. In her new book, A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 (Random House, $75), she focuses not only on modern celebrity -- the very media royalty she helped create throughout her career -- but also on her own life and loved ones. Another famed portraitist, Albert Watson, has recently completed a project on Las Vegas, constructing a series of landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that take as their subjects an array of visually enticing characters that could only come from this particular American city. New York Times photojournalist James Hill contemplates the use of portraiture as historical evidence, as does documentary photographer Lori Grinker. Dutch photographer Hendrik Kerstens turns his daughter Paula into a work of art by re-creating the indelible lighting of master painters. Photographer Mark Laita shows work from his recent book, Created Equal, a clever collection of black-and-white portraits pairing subjects that are, at least on first thought, incongruous. Throughout this portfolio, in fact, the nature of celebrity is redefined. Photographer Todd Eberle, who shoots for magazines like Vanity Fair, offers his take on artist Robert Rauschenberg. Michal Chelbin, a relatively new name in fine-art circles, creates masterly color portraits of little-known circus performers in Ukraine. Portraitist Nigel Parry turns movie stars and other celebrities into icons by seeing past the glitter of fame. Meanwhile, for famed Hollywood photographer Matthew Rolston, the artifice of the portrait is redeemed by its celebration of beauty.
Behind all this work lies a simple question that has yet to be answered: What is it that a portrait can actually reveal? In another new book on portraiture, Face of Fashion (Aperture, $60), author and curator Susan Bright notes that portraitists are necessarily concerned "with surfaces and effects. [They] ask vexing questions about commercial image-making, iconic status, [and] identity."
Renaissance painters and generations of artists held that the finest portraits show not just an outward likeness but the subject's character as well. That is a tall artistic order, never more so than in our modern world, filled as it is with imagery (and people) that we no longer completely believe in, where beautiful faces stare out from every magazine cover in every corner of the globe and invite instant idolatry. Avedon knew it when he famously concluded, as William Ewing points out, that a portrait wasn't "a fact" but "only an opinion," and that for a portraitist, "The surface is all you've got."
And yet the portrait beguiles us, tempts us to draw conclusions about the "inner character" of the subject. In yet another new book, Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas (Hill and Wang, $27), historian Alan Trachtenberg says our modern culture's distrust of "depths, interiors, [and] hidden truths" renders the photographed face "as opaque and possibly devious, a collaborative construction between artist, sitter, and viewer." He wonders whether "something important has been lost in the recent abandonment in the belief of face as text."
By way of conclusion, Trachtenberg quotes the 19th-century Boston daguerreotypist Albert Sands Southworth, who said that the gift of the portraitist is like "another sense." Southworth believed it was indeed possible to portray a face as not just a likeness but a revelation.
What the portraitist needs, said Southworth, is a "genius" for close observation, as well as a "discipline of mind and vision." Now more than ever.
|
