WORKSHOP 1
Friday 18 February
Making Faces: Portraiture and Models of Likeness
ABSTRACTS
JOANNA WOODALL (Courtauld Institute)
Pre-face
My contribution will relate to western traditions of naturalistic portraiture. It will
ask the preliminary question ‘likeness or resemblance to what’? A portrait
likeness is an image that represents, or can convince its beholders that it
represents, the named person depicted. Representation is here understood
as making (visually) present again and animating the subject in some way.
We may think of such presence, and therefore of likeness, in terms of the
accurate reproduction of physical appearance, but any old resemblance to
someone’s body is not sufficient. As Roland Barthes demonstrated, many
photographs do not function as portraits. In a portrait likeness it is also
necessary to render the subject recognisable as a distinctive being, and
create effects of living presence, both for those who know the sitter and those
who do not. The means and conventions for achieving these aims have
changed historically. Portraiture thus participates in a discourse of the named
human subject, producing as much as responding to, changing views of the
kinds of distinctiveness that merit long term commemoration and what
constitutes presence in perpetuity. Using examples drawn from the early
modern period (15th – 17th century), my talk will show that portraiture
participated in the historical production of concepts of interiority, of an ‘inner
self’ separable from, yet connected to, the body accessible to a beholder. This
dualist conception of the subject, which still informs our thinking, complicates
the issue of likeness, invoking a different kind of representation: the semiotic
concept of a material sign (the visible body) that relates in a mysterious way
to a value or meaning (the self) that is situated ‘behind’ or ‘prior to’ it.
MARCIA POINTON (University of Manchester)
‘Likeness’ as a problematic concept in historic portraiture
I shall ask the following question: is ‘likeness’ in portraiture coterminous with
facial resemblance, and if not, why not? My contribution will propose that
there are fundamental and deeply rooted cultural and philosophical issues
that militate against the production of an authentic pictured resemblance of
the appearance of a particular human face devised by another human subject.
Nonetheless the compelling economic and social requirements for portrait
imagery in European and North American societies demanded that such
imagery be produced and circulated. So how were these conflicting vectors
reconciled? I shall suggest that attention to non-facial characteristics of
portrait imagery may provide some answers.
HUGH ALDERSEY-WILLIAMS (Independent Scholar)
“Like is an ill mark”
This presentation will discuss aspects of personal identity, representation and
likeness through the personal examples selected for display at the 2009-10
Wellcome Collection exhibition: 'Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives'. The
largely intuitive process of selection by the curators examples and visitors'
response to them powerfully inform theoretical notions of identity.
These subjects included an actor, an artist, diarists, a pair of twins and
leading scientists involved in the science of identity. The media through which
these people's personalities were represented ranged from painting and
photography (portrait and self-portrait) to diaries, video diaries, press reports,
fingerprints, brain scans and DNA profiles. In each case, personal identity is
shown to be more multilayered and ambiguous than we tend to assume it to
be. For example, the twins presented in the exhibition were in fact born more
than two years apart (due to IVF), which immediately challenges our
assumption of what it means to be a twin, what that means for individual
personality, and even the meaning of the word twin.
I will also look at cases where intervening time and distance problematize
personal identity with reference to literary and historical accounts including
cases of absence and return, where acceptance and recognition are not
always in agreement.
At the heart of these cases is the fact that 'identity' established by others is
always and necessarily a reduction - sometimes insultingly so - of the person.
Fingerprints, photographs, PIN numbers and DNA profiles vary in their
acceptability according to context, but all are severe abbreviations of the self.
What is lost in these processes and what are the implications of this reduction
for the individual and for society. The self-portrait maybe more 'complete', but
raises other questions of intentionality. What are the important differences
between a self-portrait and the portrait of another? Are there circumstances in
which a 'neutral' portrait is possible?
SUZANNAH BIERNOFF (Birkbeck, University of London)
Faces of war
This paper compares the portrayal of facial injury during the First World
War to contemporary photographs of veterans injured in Iraq and
Afghanistan. One of the most poignant innovations of the Great War
was the production of portrait masks for severely disfigured servicemen:
the surgical ‘failures’. In London and Paris, professional sculptors were
responsible for the provision of these delicate masks, and their results
are recorded in the photographs of British home front photographer
Horace Nicholls and in a silent film of Anna Coleman Ladd at work in
her American Red Cross studio in Paris. Both sources document the
artistry of prosthetic repair, and Nicholls’ images dramatize the
psychological impact of facial mutilation – regarded by many to be the
most dehumanizing of injuries. Paradoxically, though, the juxtaposition
of human face and portrait mask disturbs the equation of identity and
appearance on which traditional portraiture depends.
Given the professed ‘death of the portrait,’ one might expect a different
treatment of disfigurement today; a loosening of the conviction that
appearance and identity are relatively fixed; a more dispersed
conception of personhood. Images from recent conflicts do not bear
this out, however, and the representation of disfigured veterans (indeed,
disfigurement of any sort) in the press and popular culture remains
convention-bound. We will look at the work of two contemporary
photographers, one American, one British, whose portraits of veterans
challenge the usual narratives of sacrifice, courage and redemption –
including the fantasy of repair. Nina Berman’s now iconic wedding
portrait of the Iraq war veteran Ty Ziegel and his fiancée, Renee Kline,
was seen online by 100,000 people in a single day after it won the
World Press Photo competition for portraiture in 2007. Stuart Griffiths’
photographs of homeless and socially marginalised British ex-forces
personnel are less well known, and closer to his own experiences as an
ex-paratrooper, but equally powerful in their manipulation of portraiture
as a form of protest.
NICHOLA RUMSEY (Centre for Appearance Research,
University of the West of England)
Whole face transplantation: issues of identity and recognition
Research over the past two decades has identified a number of psychological
challenges associated with a facial appearance which is different from the
norm. Daily difficulties include staring and intrusive questions or avoidance by
others, and significant psychosocial impacts including heightened self
consciousness, and social anxiety, and lowered self esteem and self
confidence. Whole face transplantation is heralded by surgeons and the
media as offering the best chance yet of improving the quality of life of those
affected by severe disfigurement. However, living with a face donated by a
recently deceased other may well present considerable psychological
challenges too, including issues of identity and recognition by others, and
living with the risks of acute or chronic rejection of the transplant and the side
effects of immunosuppression (including those which may affect appearance).
These issues will be outlined to workshop participants and opened for
discussion and debate.
DEBORAH PADFIELD (Slade School of Fine Art)
Facing pain
The face is to express pain, to express happiness, to express joy…
I am all day long fighting with pain … It is a face so contracted and immobile… I can’t
live with this pain … (facial pain patient, UCLH).
This paper will give a brief outline of the face2face project at UCL/UCLH moving
onto discuss specific images in detail. Face2face is a collaboration between artist,
Deborah Padfield, Pain Consultant Professor Joanna Zakrzewska and the facial pain
team at UCLH. It asks whether the process of portraiture, which relies on a
collaborative exchange between sitter and artist and the process of image making,
(frequently one of making visible that which is invisible) can reveal anything useful
about the subjective experience of pain and how we see and respond to each other?
Could this both increase our understanding of the impact of pain and expand our
conception of the portrait? One strand involves artist and patient co-creating
photographic ‘portraits’ of pain. A selection is made by the patient and reviewed
subsequently with treating clinicians. The participatory roles of artist, clinician and
patient in the co-construction of meaning and narrative is acknowledged.
Additionally, four workshops were held at both the National Portrait Gallery and the
Education Centre UCLH in October/November 2009 for facial pain clinicians and
patients to attend together. Images and issues arising out of these will be discussed,
with a focus on the final session exploring collaborative portraits and composite
photographs. Continually negotiated, these images became conversations through
drawing; dialogue broken down into component parts.
The photograph is examined not only as an aesthetic space but as a potential
‘transitional’ object with social agency allowing access to other ways of ‘knowing’
illness and disease. The hypothesis is that Art is capable of introducing new
knowledge into a clinical setting.