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 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

“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 DR H W DIAMOND

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.