PORTRAITS
What is a Portrait?
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s
being photographed, and what he does with that knowledge is as
much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he
looks.
Richard Avedon (quote from the Saatchi Gallery)
Richard Avedon
The portrait photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image
repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front
of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I
want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am,
and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.
Roland Barthes Camera Lucida 1980.
The camera can say anything the photographer or sitter wants to
say.
Susan Bright Art Photography Now
A portrait is the questioning or exploration of identity through a
literal representation of what somebody looks like.
Susan Bright Art PhotographyNow2005
Traditionally portraits have used clues or props to tell the viewer
more about the sitter's personality and to give the sitter a
context in which to be understood.
Susan Bright Art Photography Now 2005
The belief in a personal essence or soul, so deeply rooted in the
tradition of painted portraiture, was carried over to
photographs.
The paradox is that the inner workings of the complex human
psyche can never really be understood by just looking at a
picture.
Furthermore, the viewer of the photograph then adds his or her
experience to it to create another version of it’s meaning.
Susan Bright Art PhotographyNow2005
When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul
has endeavored to do it's duty towards them in recording
faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of
the outer man.
Julia Margaret Cameron discussing her photographs of "the great Carlyle 1874
(Illuminations edited by Liz Heron and Val Williams)
What was demanded of portraits was, on the one hand, that they
incorporated the signifiers of aristocratic portraiture and, on the
other hand, that they be produced at a price within the resources of
the middle class.
In 1839, when Daguerre made public his photographic process,
what he stressed was its potential accessibility to a wide public
"Anyone" he claimed "can take the most detailed views in a few
minutes" by "a chemical and physical process which gives nature
the ability to reproduce herself"
John Tagg The Burden of Representation 1988
The ideological conception of the photograph as a direct and
'natural' cast of reality was present from the very beginning, and,
almost immediately, its appeal was exploited in portraiture.
The use of photography, as a process which enables accurate
records to be made quickly and cheaply, is clearly underpinned by
a whole set of assumptions about the reality of the photograph
and the real 'in' the photograph.
John Tagg The Burden of Representation 1988
The head-on stare, so characteristic of simple portrait
photography, was a pose which would have been read in
contrast to the cultivated asymmetries of aristocratic posture.
What we have here in this standardised image is more than a
picture of a supposed criminal. It is a portrait of the product of
the disciplinary method…When accumulated, such images
amount to a new representation of society.
John Tagg The Burden of Representation 1988
DR H W DIAMOND
“the peculiar application of photography to the delineation of
insanity..the Photographer secures with unerring accuracy the
external phenomena of each passion, as the really certain
indication of internal derangement, and exhibits to the eye the
well-known sympathy which exists between the diseased brain
and the organs and features of the body”
Quoted by John Tagg
http://lensculture.com/kander.html
Research Assignment
This is an assignment for your work journal.
• Find a photographer that you think succeeds in
communicating a message about the person in their portrait.
Say what you think that message is and how it is
communicated.
• Find another portrait photographer that you think does not
succeed in communicating a message about the person in
their portrait. Why do you think that this photographer is
unsuccessful.