Case Study 7-2

The Honorific Photographic Portrait

The portrayal of the human subject provides a way of thinking about social identity. As a much quoted statement claims, ‘The portrait is therefore a sign whose purpose is both the description of an individual and the inscription of social identity’ (Tagg, 1988: 37). The statement underlines how a portrait presents a likeness of a person and tells us something about them at the same time. This dual aspect of the portrait is what makes it interesting. The portrait, whether painted, drawn or photographed, asks its audience to consider the interaction between likeness and social identity. The viewer is faced with a portrait image and a human subject. Distinguished examples of the genre have cultural status and this in turn influences the meanings we attach to them.

Looking at portraits is puzzling. We are drawn to the human subject whilst reflecting on the portraitist’s intention. It is a document that records and describes whilst being subject to aesthetic choice and design issues. The relative importance of reportage and expression is always in the balance. As a general rule, the artist, as a creative agent, is graded more highly than the subject he or she records. In the case of campaigning photojournalism the photographer petitions for his subject and demands some connection with the world beyond the image. In this case the subject takes priority over the portraitist. These positions may be reversible when documentary photography is upgraded to the status of art or when the artwork discovers new audiences beyond the academy.

The photographic portrait is historically connected with the painted portrait. The two practices are closely aligned in important ways and they are also defined by their differences. It is in any case worth noting how photography took over the work of the portraitist and expanded the genre in the nineteenth century. The popularity of photographic portraiture from the outset can be explained in two ways. Firstly, it was a novelty medium and allowed large numbers of people to own pictures of themselves. From the time of its inception the relatively quicker methods of photography provided affordable black and white portraits to people who may have never seen themselves in a picture of any kind hitherto. Secondly, photographs helped people to establish a self-image in a medium related to the arts.

Photographs made in high street studios from the 1850s onwards established the medium as an economically viable practice.  The daguerreotype was the most commercially successful portrait format in the 1840s and 1850s. Each picture, protected by a velvet frame, made it look like a precious, collectible objet d’art. The daguerreotype was a single positive picture and was followed by methods that accelerated the commercial prospects of the medium. Miniaturist portrait painters were adversely affected by photography and many took up the medium themselves or turned to the vicarious practice of hand colouring photographic prints. The threat posed by photography to portrait painting was an issue for the miniaturists, whilst illustrators lampooned the new invention. The French critic Charles Baudelaire denounced photography as a mechanical interloper in the visual arts. Some artists however greeted photography with enthusiasm. The ability of the camera to capture likeness and freeze a moment in time, document appearances, and capture the fragmentary experience of city life had parallels in the work of progressive artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Herein lies the seeds of the modernist alliance of art and photography that would be explored in later vanguard movements in the visual arts.

In the nineteenth century the mechanical character of photography seemed to offer exactitude and precision. These properties allowed it considerable status in commerce, industry and science, and it was allowed a subsidiary role in the arts as a supplier of visual data to be worked on by the artistic mind. The artist is this purview remained a lofty figure whose poetic faculties reigned over the demand for exactness. Indeed throughout this century the photographer was a relatively subordinate figure in comparison with the fine artist. The art historian Steve Edwards underlines the Victorian distinction between ‘the work of genius and the work of the photographer’:

As long as photography was seen as an autogenic process that produced images in the absence of a subject, it could not hope to occupy the same place as painting or its ‘sister arts’ (Edwards, 2006: 61). 

From its earliest formulations in Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844-1846), photography was promoted as the technically proficient medium par excellence. The combination of photography and portraiture was a double-barrelled negation of the romantic concept of artistic genius. Portraiturewas seen as a descriptive genre preoccupied with recording the outward appearance of the sitter. A literal re-creation of a sitter had lesser status compared to the insightful interpretation of a subject’s inner self. Portraiture had accordingly been given a relatively minor place in the hierarchy of genres and placed below history painting, devotional subjects and imaginative reconstructions of heroic themes in the arts. The art historian John Gage observes:

Photography has been promoted chiefly as a neutral tool of exact reproduction. And this has led to the devaluation of the photograph as an aesthetic object very much on the same lines as the portrait itself had earlier been devalued (Gage, 1997: 120).

The tendency to assign a relatively minor place to photography qua painting is perhaps too generalising and many historians have detected alternative narratives. Certainly photographers built on and developed the aristocratic functions of the portrait reaching back to the Renaissance.  This tradition is focused on the depiction of socially privileged and esteemed persons including royalty, high clergy, wealthy citizens, scholars, artists, and others who sat for the most fashionable portrait painters of their day. Great explorers, scientists, poets and novelists were also photographed in the nineteenth century as exemplars within this tradition. They are the denizens of honorific portraiture that confers status and identity upon its subject. It is a category of portrait photography associated with photographers such as Cecil Beaton and others in the twentieth century. Official photographic portraits of Queen Elizabeth II by Annie Lebovitz, for example, are more recent examples of this kind of work (see Rethinking Photography, Chapter 1, fig. 1.8).

Photography was largely indebted to painting in its early days. This is particularly evident in photographic portraiture. Little effort was made to isolate specifically photographic qualities, such as close ups and expressive lighting effects before the 1860s. Gage identifies Julia Margaret Cameron as an eminent Victorian photographer who revitalised the genre in a series of ‘confrontational portraits’ that successfully isolated and framed the heads of her subjects in ways that ‘would have been unthinkable without the psychological distancing of a mechanical device’ (Gage, 1997: 125). In other words Cameron (see Rethinking Photography, Chapter 2, fig. 2.12) exploited the potential of the medium in ways that distinguished her practice from the conventions of painted portraiture.

The photographers of the great and good continued in a tradition of deference to authority. An artist’s economic dependence on patronage is acute in the case of the portraitist. The commissioning of portraits and presumed need for the flattery of its subject is at odds with the creative self-image of the artist. Indeed, the self-image of the artist was compromised in commercial portrait studios that sprang up in all the major cities of the world in the 1850s and 1860s. Run-of-the-mill imagery, including the carte-de-visite, took its inspiration from official art of the past, the tradition of the painted portrait, rather than attempting to explore the potential of photographic method.  Much of this kind of work relied on the use of staged backgrounds, dramatic lighting, and fashionable costume. This was a tradition that relied on an idealised notion of ‘likeness’ and specious attempts to construct an image of social power or self-fulfilment (Fig. 1). It was a valuable way of gaining ‘visibility’ and social status. It also helped to solidify the collective portrait of the middle class in industrial societies. Used as a calling card the carte-de-visite wasakin to leaving a photographic trace of the body with others as one moved about the world (Pultz, 1995: 17).

Link to Figure 1

Figure 1: André-Adolphe Disderi, Duc de Coimbra

A polyphoto print of the type to be cut out and pasted on a carte de visite, c1855-1865.

Case Study 7-3

Repressive and Commercial Modes of Portraiture

The range of photographic portraiture is, however, more extensive than our art historical connections suggest. The photographic portrait (being a relatively cheap expedient by comparison with oil painting) has served a multiplicity of purposes since its inception. It has many commonplace functions beyond its capacity to satisfy the interests of privileged and aspiring social groups in the period of its early development. We refer here to the part played by photography in commodity cultures and its gradual assimilation into the emerging publicity and news industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We should note how these industries relied, from their inception, on representations of the human body often posed for the camera in gender specific and sexualised roles. Much of this kind of photography falls outside this discussion and yet fashion, advertising, promotional film work (reworked in the film/collage work of the contemporary artist John Stezaker), and wedding photography are closely related to portraiture. In all these practices the role of the photographer is constrained by the perceived needs of the client and effective reduction of creative autonomy.

Imaginative and original work has always existed in commercial practice as the history of portraiture itself demonstrates (see Rethinking Photography Chapter 11 for discussion of photography in advertising and Chapter 12 for contemporary issues relating to photography and the world of work). This point notwithstanding, commissioned work, and commercial work generally, have traditionally challenged the romantic idea of artistic freedom. The art historian Joanna Woodall notes:

Commissioned portraiture, long discussed as a source of artistic subservience, has become widely regarded as necessarily detrimental to creativity (Woodall, 1997: 7).

Analysts have dissected commercial photography and its reduction to the promotional styles of advertising, news and other market-driven functions. Much of this work exploits gendered and class-based stereotypes. The common quality found in art and the more or less rigid stereotyping of the subject in commercial photography (including portrait photography) is a kind of aesthetic idealisation. The tendency to make the photographic or artistic subject conform to aesthetic norms established more widely in the culture is achieved in different ways. For example, responsiveness to established notions of ‘the feminine’ or the adoption of a dress code that signals ‘bourgeois respectability’ (Fig. 1). The predisposition to provide a certain ‘look’ was inherited from the style and content of the painted portrait. The Victorian industrialist could be made to look like a king.

The generic term portraiture signifies the idea of capturing a likeness and yet, we are reminded, this is a contingent notion. Indeed, in all forms of portraiture, ‘likeness’ is modified by aesthetic factors and the influence of universal or ideal qualities. Such things have bearing on the visual outcome. The critical assault on the widespread use of the stereotype (which is a form idealisation) is well documented in cultural theory (see Hall, 1997: 257-264). Indeed, stereotyping of a subject introduces conformism. This in turn generates aesthetic choices that become available to the artist or photographer.

The cultural theorist Anandi Ramamurthy has noted how photography performed as part of commodity culture in the nineteenth century. He notes the compromised role of photography in the twilight zone between high culture and an expanding capitalist marketplace:

The commodification of the photograph dulled the possible creativity of the new technology, by the desire to reproduce a set of conventions already established within painted portraiture (Ramamurthy, 2001: 168).

Commercial studios popularised portrait photography and increased its availability to a wide public. Advances in the industrial production of cameras and photographic materials transformed the medium into a viable industry. By the 1880s, facilities for photomechanical reproduction created potential for the medium to occupy and define new territories, including the new bureaucracies associated with the modern state. They included varying kinds of institutions including ‘medical, legal and municipal apparatuses’ (Tagg, 1988: 60) which enlisted the services of photographers charged with the job of photographing marginalised or deviant figures in society.

The rogues and miscreants enlisted by public authorities for scientific study included prisoners, colonial subjects, or those in need of charity or other social services. The pleasure of photographic recreation advanced in the 1880s with the invention of easy-to-use hand-held cameras and the popularisation of the picture postcard. The photograph, however, had other less decorous functions. The private calling card was adapted to public documentary purposes including passports and state regulated types of identification and surveillance. Critical texts on photographic portraiture have emphasised how it was used to demonise social groups who fell outside the boundaries of social privilege and decorum. The photograph in this reckoning was judged to be more than a new system of visual communication. Its capacity to standardise and subjugate had political implications.

Photographic portraits - often just heads and shoulders in police files – were used to identify convicted criminals and kept in police files as for surveillance purposes and as part of a growing system of social regulation. Such images represent characteristic techniques of modern administration. The artist and writer Allan Sekula has noted how photography is connected with the emerging science of criminology in the later nineteenth century: ‘The camera is integrated into a larger ensemble: a bureaucratic-clerical-statistical system of “intelligence”’ (Sekula, 1989: 351). The art historian John Tagg has also underlined what he calls the ‘complicity of photography in this spreading network of power’ (Tagg, 1988: 74).

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Key term: Physiognomy
Physiognomy is a form of popular science based on the belief that a person’s character can be deduced from his or her appearance. It is a kind of face reading that has its origins in antiquity. It became a more rigorously empirical method in the Victorian period. It is now largely considered as bogus science with little to recommend it as a way of studying human personality.

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Much of the human typology invented in the period of industrial capitalism included racist and class-based fictions designed to consolidate power relations detrimental to demonised social groups. Physiognomy claimed scientific legitimacy, but relied on older methods (rooted in the visual arts) of constructing social difference and based on ‘visual interpretation of the body’s signs – specifically the signs of the head’ (Sekula, 1989: 351). The attributes associated with a Westernised concept of ideal beauty and refinement were contrasted with the absence of these qualities in the average police file mug shot. Sekula describes the essentialist nature of this approach in a comparison between Western and non-Western head types:

Based on the art-historical evidence of noble Grecian foreheads, this racist geometrical fiction defined a descending hierarchy of head types with upright Caucasian brows approaching this lost ideal more closely than did the presumably apelike brows of Africans (Sekula, 1989: 356).

This suggests a hierarchy of aesthetic and moral values calibrated against the outward features of a range of individuals from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. The aesthetic norm of the classical ideal (‘noble Grecian foreheads’) is contrasted with the outward signs of the  ‘deviant’ or ‘abnormal’ that is made to stand outside it. If the social conventions of the day influence the way a figure is depicted what can we say about the quest for likeness? Is likeness altered in photography in ways that allow for a historically determined and conventional view of a subject?

Link to Figure 2

Figure 2: Francis Galton, 3 composites of criminals taken from 4, 9, and 5 different persons. Composite of the whole 18 of them in the centre, 1882.

Francis Galton, statistician and inventor of the pseudo-science of eugenics, devised a technique for making the composite photograph in the 1870s. This involved the superimposition of several negatives taken from several individual sitters. The single print derived from a multiplicity of originals would, in Galton’s view, represent a visual average or social type. Having obtained a ‘standardised’ image his results were adapted to social and biological refinement of the human stock. His ideas on human improvement and genetic control are related to his experimental work in photography. Galton’s research was linked with the wider use of photography as a law enforcement technique.

The photograph was believed to be a truthful and useful guide to the detection of criminal behaviour. Modern surveillance techniques are rooted in the police file mug shots and ‘rogues gallery’ images of the late nineteenth century. Gage notes this ‘taxonomy of criminal types belonged to a substantial tradition of physiognomic typing for the purposes of social control’ (Gage, 1997: 123).

The art historian Richard Brilliant says we might think about a portrait as a head ‘modified by distinctive features about which the artist wishes to convey information’ (Brilliant, 1997: 37). It is, he says, a schema that may ‘adhere very closely to literal representation or take the form of a composite derived from the observation of human beings in like condition’ (Brilliant, 1997: 37). In other words portraits are a mix of observational interpretation (or direct transcription in photography) and socio-artistic convention. Brilliant rightly allows for the exercise of taste and discrimination in his description of portraiture. This may seem to contrast with the quasi-scientific methods used by Galton and yet, despite the assumed objectivity in his methods, the results were highly personalised and discriminatory.

The portrait has an ambiguous position. When it gravitates towards a classical ideal it builds on and improves upon nature. When it modestly reproduces the appearance of nature, as it may attempt to do in an objective or realistic portrayal, it may be judged to ‘merely imitate’ or without the attribute of applied of aesthetic judgement. Both positions are, nevertheless, subject to aesthetic and social determinations. Any kind of representation may rely on ‘facts’, but a picture is never restricted to this one-dimensional reading. It always has a generalising effect. In the composite photograph we see a ‘likeness to type’ rather than an individual. Our ways of reading the image allows us to move from the particular to a wider social meaning. The tendency to generalise a view of the individual, however, applies to all portraits. The most candid and direct depictions have this potential.

The generalising effect of an image offers a clue to the way all portraits make the sitter look like a type of human subject as well as the individual it may resemble. The shaping of social identity in pictures, and other media, relies on the strategic use of visual cues. These are repeated in ways that familiarises audiences with caricatures of a chosen subject and their reading has social effects. The accumulated images of the poor and the derelict in the early archives of the Victorian period were seldom part of movements campaigning for their social betterment. We may generally take them be negative social stereotypes. Early photographs of convicted criminals demonstrate the use of compositional and expressive codes. The relative position of the figure within the picture frame, the clarity of the image (or lack of clarity), the body position and camera angle and other visual effect can be used to create meanings that are recurrent in in the visual arts. Similarly the codes of expression belong to established repertories of meaning. The blank look of a prisoner contrasts with the self-satisfied look of the bourgeois customer. What concerns us in our study of the portrait is the divergence between the codification of social privilege in certain types of picture and codification of social inferiority in others.

Case Study 7-4

Brutalising Posture versus Cultivated Asymmetry

[Embed hyperlink to figure 3 here]Link to Figure 3

Figure 3: Anon., Victorian ‘mug shot’, Edward Boman, 1894.

As we have noted the head-on and harsh frontal stare was characteristic of photographic portraits of colonial subjects and convicted criminals (Fig. 3). Tagg for example, observes how

Rigid frontality signified the bluntness and ‘naturalness’ of a culturally unsophisticated class and had a history that predated photography (Tagg, 1988: 36)

 

Spartan simplicity and the frontal view so commonly seen in ‘simple portrait photography’ contrasts with the aristocratic posturing in the bourgeois carte-de-visite (Fig. 1). Tagg speaks of ‘cultivated asymmetries of aristocratic posture’ and observes how middle-class appearance in the photographic portrait ‘aped the mannerisms of eighteenth-century painted portraits and coveted their prestige’ (Tagg, 1988: 36).

Note the changes in pose and points of view in the sequence illustrated in Figure 1. The relative freedom of the model in this example indicates his co-operation in the shoot and the architectural setting as indicators of social distinction and taste. The image demonstrates how social standing and economic status are linked with photographic portraiture. The bourgeois portrait expresses a level of social optimism encoded in body language and dress codes. A degree of self-projection in the portrayed subject anticipates an audience response. In contrast the mug shot images in Figure 3 express submission to the camera’s gaze and the indignity of the file index as its destination. Tagg argues that

By the 1880s the head-on view had become the accepted format of the popular snapshot, but also of photographic documents like prison records and social surveys in which this code of social inferiority framed the meaning of representations of the objects of supervision or reform (Tagg, 1988: 36-37).

As a general rule avoidance of flat frontality is often found in portraits that seek to bestow social status and convey the impression of power and authority in its subject. ‘Civilisation’, as we have noted, is often expressed in aesthetic ideals that derive from imagery of the official art of past cultures. Note for example how lighting is used to create drama and to romanticise a German soldier in Figure 4. The photographic portrait by Erna Lendvai-Dircksen was used as Nazi propaganda during the Second World War. It is typical of the kind of image that elevates its subject. It is an example of aesthetic idealisation in keeping with aristocratic ideology.

Link to Figure 4

Figure 4: Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, ‘German Soldier’, c. 1940.

The politics of representation is extensively mapped out in photography theory. Many have emphasised how picturing social groups has a capacity to define their place in the world. At one extreme the structural exclusion of the signs of social capital combines with evidence of enforcement and regulation.  At the other extreme bodily pose, accessories and decor, lighting and background in the early photographic portraits told a different story. Indeed, it is a story that derived from the traditions of the painted portrait and made little effort to disguise this connection. The converse of this is also true: the police file mug shot owed nothing to the tradition of the honorific portrait.

Galton’s interest in the identification of types (the composite portrait) represents one of the earliest attempts ‘to harness the specific potential of the photographic method’ (Gage, 1997: 123). The belief that typical features could be derived from photographs was a consistent idea in this period. The use of photography to establish an identifying link with an individual is a commonplace aspect of the technology. It corresponds with the early forensic use of finger printing and both practices rely on the indexical link between the body and its image. 

The use of the camera as social technique led to the creation of new recreational products (carte-de-visite and postcards), as well as surveillance photography. The forensic link in the case of the mug shot (and the composite) exploited medium specificity in a significant way, and achieved this without direct reference to art history. It was, in its way, original and new, and helped to establish photography as a documentary medium with powerful social implications. Gage argues that it was a break with the tradition of picture making and uniquely responsive to ‘a wholly new conception’ of “likeness’’’ (Gage, 1997: 123).

Case Study 7-5

PART II: Documentary into Art

Facing the Subject: Contemporary Viewpoints in Photographic Portraiture

Insofar as the portrait (in the history of art and photography) has been seen as medium that fixes identity in a prescriptive, and even coercive manner, it may seem extraordinary that it has had such a central place within progressive practices within these disciplines. In the catalogue that accompanied an exhibition in 2003/2004, entitled Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century, the author and curator Emma Dexter notes:

Thus today photographic portrait is simultaneously the most reactionary of photographic forms, constituting an absurd place to look for photographic truth, and at the same time it is the best place to find a first-hand and apparently authentic encounter with the trace of another being (Dexter, 2003: 19).

As one might expect in an exhibition catalogue subtitled ‘The Real in the Twentieth Century’ we find a robust defence of ‘straight descriptive photography’ (Serota, 2003, 8) including portraiture. The exhibition (Tate Modern, June-Sept 2003, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Nov 2003 –Feb 2004) sought to re-validate a certain kind of photography rooted in everyday life. The exhibition included urban landscape, industrial vernacular as well as portraiture. According to Dexter, the ‘contemporary photographers who continue to produce portraits’ include Rineke Dijkstra, Boris Mikhailov, Nicholas Nixon, Fazah Sheikh, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Michael Schmidt. Work by these photographers is included in the exhibition. In various ways they are representatives of a tradition of documentary styles that are now well established in the art world and take the gallery as the primary site for their output.

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Figure 5: Rineke Dijkstra, Kolobrzeq, Poland, July 26 1992.

There are qualities that are common to this kind work, not least a kind of grittiness that links it with the tradition of Realism (for a discussion of this term see Rethinking Photography, Chapter 3), social commitment and objective study of modern life. It is a tradition in the arts that includes the sharp-focused and socially observant documentary photography (including memorable portraiture) of the American Walker Evans in the 1930s and the German August Sander in the same period.

In Dijkstra and her forebears we see the same frontal views and strict geometry. There is the same impartiality and aesthetic restraint that is common to the documentary style of the 1930s. Avoidance of the mannerisms and pomp of past styles is taken for granted. Documentary photography in this mould is aligned with investigative and socially engaged movements, including for example, the collaboration between Evans and the writer William Agee at a time of social crisis. Dijkstra’s work is devoid of the kind of sociological urgency associated with earlier humanist photography and yet all of her mature portraits are readable as social encounters. Dijkstra’s biographical entry in Cruel and Tender describes a sequence of beach portraits from the 1990s depicting teenagers:

Every detail of their body language and clothing reveals the social stereotypes and cross-cultural differences between affluent West and Eastern Europe (Matteoda-Witte, 2003: 258).

Portraiture is a public art and, as the art historian Angela Rosenthal notes, ‘It entails a social encounter between his or her sitter’ (Rosenthal, 1997: 147). The art historian Norbert Schneider notes that ‘Almost no other genre [other than portraiture] … is capable of transmitting such an intimate sense of lived presence’. It is, he claims, a sense of presence that transmits over distance and time:

This is undoubtedly linked to our subconscious attribution to the portrait of authenticity: we expect a faithful rendering that shows us what the sitter was really like (Schneider, 2002: 12).

The matter of the lived presence is what attracts us to a portrait. This is acutely felt in the photographic trace of the body that we see in the picture.  It is a genre that extends across social and cultural boundaries between easy-going family snaps, or official portraits of the celebrities, to the more alien worlds occupied by ‘outsiders’ in the critical and debunking portraits of the Americans Diane Arbus and Robert Frank in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov in the 1990s. We may think about the encounter between the photographers and their subjects. We suspect the mechanical eye of the camera as making the contact easy and quickly accomplished. Ugliness and danger can be quickly captured and left behind and yet documenting the unknown demands courage, skill and determination. It is a social event and the finished picture invites speculation on the encounter that created it. 

Some of the portrait photographers featured in Cruel and Tender acknowledge an interest in photography that dignifies its subjects whilst avoiding romanticised clichés and sensationalist effects. Dexter notes ‘plain, artless and authentic seeing’ (Dexter, 2003: 20) in Sheikh’s portraits of Somalian refugees from the 1990s. She detects similar qualities in August Sander’s portraits from the 1920s and 1930s.

There is a strong argument in favour of a continuing humanist tradition in portrait photography. And yet the strongly didactic and socially engaging outlook of Sander (or Evans in collaboration with Agee) is, arguably, replaced by a different kind of photography that tends towards blankness and an almost strategic negation of biographical detail in its treatment of its subjects. This comment may not apply to Sheikh so much, but Dijkstra and Ruff have produced work that invites comparison, perhaps unfairly, with expressionless police files and the repressive modes of Victorian documentary.

The use of the blank expression may seem natural to portraits of prisoners. John Gage discovers its appearance elsewhere in the history of photography. He refers to range of twentieth-century portraits (especially close-up views of heads and shoulders) that offer intimate proximity between viewer and subject but without any penetration of character. His examples include Frau eines Chauffeurs (Chauffeur’s Wife)of 1928 by the German Photographer Helmar Lerski (Fig. 6). Lerski’s portrait demonstrates and interest in close ups, abstract treatment of surface, and the aesthetic effect of grainy film. Interest in medium specific photographic properties take priority over subject matter.

This photographic portrait belongs to a series of anonymous portraits of workers containing enough detail for identification of the person in the image and yet this quality, according to Gage, is secondary to a more singular interest in purely visual effects. Indeed, social engagement or discursive involvement with the subject is displaced by ‘a new repertory of surface effects’ (Gage, 1997: 128). Gage identifies a type of portrait that denies its subject ‘a sense of person’ as if her ‘likeness’ (and the reading of character that it may reveal) had become an irrelevance.

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Figure 6: Helmar Lerski, Frau eines Chauffeurs (Chauffeur’s Wife), c. 1928.

Dijkstra’s work has aroused similar concerns. The art historian Julian Stallabrass locates the discussion of her work in a wider debate that goes back to ‘imperial ethnographic photography’ (Stallabrass, 2007: 87), mug shots and images of convicted criminals discussed in Part 1 above, recalling Victorian photographs of colonial subjects (with measuring sticks and background grids), full-length portraits, which he compares with contemporary portraitists such as Dijkstra and Ruff. The similarity in pictorial design is striking: camera head-on, uniform characteristics from one image to the next, lack of facial or bodily expression, limited contextual or personal information about the sitters or details relating to the purpose of the shoot. A comparison between the work of these artists and surveillance imagery from the past signals how the technical codes of composition and photographic style inform the way we read an image.

A solitary figure enclosed in a frame, facing the camera, seems to admit that nothing is hidden. He or she is exposed and available for inspection. There are similar qualities in the socially progressive work of the American documentary photographers such Lewis Hine and later Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. The contemporary photographic portraitists featured in Cruel and Tender (Dijkstra, Ruff, Sheikh, Struth, Nixon, and Schmidt) are connected in various ways with a socially combative tradition in photography. And yet, as Stallabrass shows, this connection is politically ambiguous. There are at least two reasons for this. Firstly, this work is tarnished by its links with Victorian ethnography. Secondly, in Stallabrass’s view, work by these art photographers is only weakly connected with social documentary photography (in the tradition of Sander and Evans).

For example, work by Dijkstra and Ruff, key figures in Cruel and Tender, fail to yield what may be called ‘social knowledge’ or to engage with a study of people and cultures beyond the environment in which the work is normally seen. Stallabrass reminds us that Sander’s portraits were greeted by Walter Benjamin as ‘a training manual’ (Benjamin, 1978: 71) of the kind that appealed to a politically literate audience. In fairness we should say that the photographs of Dijkstra and Ruff demonstrate an interest in the ordinariness of the subject and in this regard have much in common with Sander. Their sitters are treated with a similar degree of aesthetic restraint and yet these works overwhelm the viewer with their large print size, high resolution and above all their colour. Stallabrass likens this to ‘a broader trend in contemporary art to exploit the effect of “data sublime”’ (Stallabrass, 2007: 82). These artists, we may conclude, are representatives of a documentary tradition adapted to a changing art world that thrives on spectacle and recuperates political or tendentious art. 

There are stylistic and thematic affinities in the work of Sander and Dijkstra. She follows his methods of choosing social types, works in series, and is fascinated by detail and its photographic documentation. Her work has the same visual economy. It is, however, different in one important aspect: her work is a kind of salon art, designed for the museum. Contemporary work of photographers by this generation has little connection with the collaborative photo-essays of Walker Evans and James Agee that were made for print media, or the radical ethnography of August Sander. The issue of changing target audiences and demographic factors are relevant to the kind of historical comparisons we are considering. We might, for example, examine how far Dijkstra and Ruff engage with the ‘dialogic and communicative functions of photography’ (Roberts, 1998: 4).

Case Study 7-6

The Frontal Viewpoint

Stallabrass’s linking of earlier documentary styles of portrait photography, including the colonized body images made for ethnological societies in the nineteenth century, with contemporary art photography, has a certain shock value. Its effect is akin to finding Jack the Ripper in the family tree and, as Stallabrass says, it raises ‘the old specter of objectification’ (Stallabrass, 2007: 72). Equally, as we have seen, severe frontality in a photograph is a further sign of objectification. These connections are, nevertheless, somewhat misleading. The break with three-quarter viewpoints and other ways of positioning the subject occurred in nineteenth-century painting and derived largely from emerging styles of commercial photographic portraiture in the 1850s.

The French painter Manet, for example, took the idea from commercial photography and introduced the harsh frontal stare in his own portraits and figure compositions. As we have noted a ‘full frontal’ view exploits the subject’s frailties or, alternatively, gives it presence and social connection with the spectator. Roberts notes the authority and pride of workers staring directly into Hine’s camera (Roberts, 1998: 75). The frontal designs of Dijkstra and Ruff belong to this honourable lineage. As we have noted the ‘deadpan’ aesthetic avoids the rhetorical styles of celebrity portraiture in favour of ‘blankness and objectivity’ (Roberts, 1998: 82) and the geometrically pure motif of a frontal, audience- facing sitter. 

There are two further points to be made on what Tagg (who began this discussion in the 1980s) called the ‘the burden of frontality’ in the photographic portrait.  Firstly, there is a possibility in the work of Dijkstra (and the others listed by Stallabrass) that a head-on frontal pose of the sitter is a kind of provocation. The artist’s intention is therefore to reframe the disciplinary motif of imperialist discourse as a new, socially inclusive direction in contemporary art. Secondly, as the connection with Manet and Hine suggests, ‘flatness’ (or frontality) is not itself essentially repressive.

The Victorian photographers charged with the task of dehumanising criminals, and others, adopted a highly functional set of visual cues (frontality, blankness, economical framing and so forth) to create a particular way seeing. Its effect was repressive because it wilfully reinforced social difference and was fed into a system that guaranteed this kind of reading. In the work of Dijkstra, as Stallabrass admits, there is a sense in which the viewer and the viewed have a kind of parity. We should also recognise the different historical context. Their pictures circulate in a milieu that recognises the struggle for human rights and social equality. This is the argument developed by Tate Modern when it exhibited these portraits in 2003.

Case Study 7-7

The New Objectivity

The sharp focus and compositional simplicity of the documentary style derived from an artistic trend that emerged in Germany in the 1920s. It was entitled Die Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity). The trend was represented in photography by a commitment to a modern industrialised look, visual sobriety, and a shallow depth of field. There was also pronounced interest in vernacular objects, non-descript provinciality and the lives of ordinary people (see Hayward Gallery, 1979). These were artistic properties that celebrated the technical effects particular to camera vision including close ups (see Figure 6), high and low viewpoints, sharp imagery and impersonal surface qualities. An interest in the anonymously made things of popular culture, the mundane and overlooked aspects of everyday life informed the ideas of photographers.

Sander’s work typified this aesthetic and favoured simple reportage rather than heroic gestures or self-expression. Many aesthetic properties associated with The New Objectivity survived the upheavals of the Second World War and re-emerged in the ideas of conceptual artists in the 1960s. For example the work of the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher (see Rethinking Photography, Chapter 8, fig. 8.2) are connected with this style. Their influence was important for Ruff and Thomas Struth at the Dusseldorf Art Academy in Germany in the 1980s. Some of the key aesthetic principles in contemporary art photography belong to an artistic lineage that goes back to Sander and Die Neue Sachlichkeit.

Consistently viewed from a centred and frontal position, the Bechers produced a large photographic archive of their selected sites. Their displays were systematically ordered, and supported by matter-of-fact descriptions. The concrete bunkers and water towers they photographed were treated as modern ruins, seemingly unnoticed and curiously vulnerable objects. Their link with portraiture now seems highly relevant. It is a genre that captures the ageing process (Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Grey, Rembrandt’s self-portraits, and Dijkstra’s Almyrisa series are concerned with the physical effects of time on the human frame). A work by the Bechers, with its melancholy charm, represents a kind of salvage ethnography (Edwards, 2009: 67). It is conservationist and respectful of time passing by. A portrait, and especially a photo-portrait, has the same poetic link with its subject. The ‘dispassionate and clear-eyed’ view associated with The New Objectivity and its survival in the work Dijkstra, Ruff, et al. isolates the ordinary and makes it vital and worth knowing. The art historian Steve Edwards notes how Sander’s social typologies are like an archive for studying class difference (Edwards, 2004: 405). This thought returns the debate on contemporary portraiture to the matter of its socio-political relevance.

The German critic Walter Benjamin, writing at the time of The New Objectivity, in an essay published in 1931, said that

Where photography takes itself out context, severing its connections illustrated by Sander, Blossfeldt and Krull, where it frees itself from physiognomic, political and scientific interest… then it becomes creative…  photography turns into a kind of arty journalism (Benjamin, 1978: 72).

Benjamin believed photographs were capable of changing people’s perception of everyday life and argued for its place in a dynamic working-class culture. Much of what we have argued underlines the idea that photography with its powerful evidential and inscriptive qualities is primarily a social medium. We have also alluded to the fact that some of the great portraitists had, and perhaps still have, a moral grasp of their own potential. How far this extends into contemporary practices, as Stallabrass and others have shown, remains debatable.

There is a creative tension that occurs in the photographic portrait, and this point relates specifically to the examples discussed in this case study, between the photographer as creative agent and the work as a medium of social exchange. These things are not mutually exclusive and yet the art world often expects photography, the most explicitly denotative of all the arts, to reinvent the photographer as auteur. What he or she sees and records, the shivering teenager on a beach (Dijkstra) or the expressionless images of young people in sequences (Ruff), are predominantly representations of artistic vision. Whatever agency exists in the subject itself is ignored or marginal to this objective. This is a key point in the Stallabrass essay: ‘the artist retains agency, as does the viewer, a double of the artist, who freely reflects on the artist’s products’ (Stallabrass, 2007: 90). The works of Dijkstra may not be ‘arty journalism’ but they are some distance from the radical ethnography that inspired them.

Case Study 7-8

Conclusion

This case study has addressed the way photographic portraiture and documentary practices have interacted since the beginning of photography. We have underlined the importance of portraiture and re-affirmed its powerful influence in the construction of social meaning. We have noted how the cultural status of the portrait (whether high or low) underpins the social value attributed to its sitters. We have also argued that the social value of the sitter may impact on the portraitist himself or herself. Towards the end of the study we show how far the social identity of the sitter, and the world he or she represents, is often effaced by the institutional framework in which it appears.

The photographic portrait has a central place in contemporary art. It is a genre that commands the attention of audiences attending major museums and it has overshadowed other media in the fine arts. We have centred the discussion on the academic standing of photography within contemporary art practice but noted now far the success of portraiture has been influenced by social documentary photography. We have also posed questions about the extent to which contemporary photographic portraiture has remained in the vanguard of social change, and conversely, we have asked the reader to consider how far the practice has become isolated in its own aesthetic terrain.

Case Study 7-9

Summary of Key Points

• Photographic portraiture has strong art-historical connections.
• Portraiture is central to photography as a commercial practice.
• Photographic portraiture had a key role in the construction of new social typologies emerging in the industrial period.
• Our study of the portrait is centred on its potential for codifying social difference and reproducing its social effects.
• Technical codes such as blankness and frontality in the photographic portrait position were used to reinforce negative ways of seeing marginalised social groups. Recoded versions of these visual signs in portrait photography have claimed social and aesthetic distinction.
• The authority attaching to the presentation of one’s likeness in a portrait is notable. The achievement of self-presentation, in particular circumstances, privileges the subject.
• The institutional site of a portrait influences its cultural status.
• Critical debates have centred on the tension between aesthetic and social readings of portrait imagery.  We have noted how progressive trends in photography remain in the vanguard of social change.
• Some key examples of contemporary portraiture, including photographic portraiture, negate the achievement of ‘likeness’ as a central concern. The portrayed subject is thus made secondary to the work as visual spectacle. The effect of social ‘privileging’ of the subject in portraiture is avoided in key examples of contemporary art photography.

Case Study 7-10

References

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