Portrait Photography and Appropriation

Portraits are everywhere. We think we know what they are for and what they do. They depict what people look like and they capture or distil their particular identity. But in everyday life, it might be argued, portraits trade in stereotypes and clichés. And if the advent of identity politics has demonstrated any- thing, it is how deeply problematic it is to think that identi- ty can be ‘captured’ or ‘distilled’. This reading list encourages a more analytical understanding of portraiture as an artistic genre, with particular reference to feminist/gender/disability/ ethnic/post-colonial issues. How have artists pushed at the li- mits and conventions of the type, how are people represented in portraits, and how have philosophers understood its essen- tial nature? The list aims to address central topics in aesthetics and philosophy of art through the genre of portraiture, adding relevant insights from art history and art theory, and thus ena- bling students to acquire a more sophisticated understanding of what making and looking at portraits actually involves.

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As technological practices of the portrait have proliferated across the media ecosystem in recent years, this canonical genre of identity and representation has provoked a new wave of scholarly attention and artistic experimentation. This collection of essays explores the stakes of that seemingly anachronistic comeback. It reframes portraiture as a set of cultural techniques for the dynamic performance of subjects entangled in specific medial configurations. Tracking the portrait across a wide range of media – literature, drawings, paintings, grave stelae, films, gallery installations, contemporary music videos, deep fakes, social media, video games, and immersive VR interfaces – the contributors interrogate and transform persistent metaphysical and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from traditional notions of portraiture.

Philosophical Studies, 2007

This article addresses the portrait as a philosophical form of art. Portraits seek to render the subjective objectively visible. In portraiture two fundamental aims come into conflict: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. In the first part of my paper, studying works by Rembrandt, I develop a typology of four different things that can be meant when speaking of an image’s power to show a person: accuracy, testimony of presence, emotional characterization, or revelation of the essential “air” (to use Roland Barthes’ term). In the second half of my paper this typology is applied to examples from painting and photography to explore how the two media might differ. I argue that, despite photography’s alleged ‘realism’ and ‘transparency,’ it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture’s two aims, the revelatory and the expressive.

Portraiture, says Richard Brilliant, is one of the earliest attempts to encounter the other and the self. It is like a window opening to our "self" through the "other". That is why observinglooking at -portraits is so attractive, so challenging. Fascinated by this "opening" and being an admirer of photographic portraiture, I came across a photographic work that inspired me to reflect on the uncanny moment between the poser and the camera/photographer. The following paper is the result of this reflection, which not only analyses the moment of the pose in photography but also questions the representation of the "self" in photographic portraiture while introducing the work of two contemporary Turkish photographers.

Portraiture as a practice has undergone great changes over time. Portraits have been made in different media (from painting and sculpture to film and video), of different kinds of people (from kings and queens to peasants and workers), in a variety of materials (from the ancient Egyptian portraits on wooden panels to Marc Quinn’s self-portrait in blood), and have served a multiplicity of purposes (from glorifying or ridiculing a person to making an artistic or political statement). But what holds the practice of portraiture together? What is it that all portraits have in common and in virtue of which they are portraits? That is the central question of this paper. Starting from, and building on, a critical investigation of some recent philosophical attempts to define the portrait, the paper’s ambition is to arrive at an extensionally adequate account of portraiture, that is, an account that captures as much of the extension as possible of what we ordinarily think counts as a portrait. In section 1 Cynthia Freeland’s theory of portraiture is presented, while section 2 offers some objections against said theory. Freeland’s definition of a portrait as an image that presents a recognizably distinct individual who has emotional or conscious states, and who is able to participate in the creative process by posing, is shown to be too narrow in some respects and too broad in other respects. In section 3 the main features and strengths of Paolo Spinicci’s phenomenological approach to portraiture are articulated, while its particular shortcomings are highlighted in section 4. A discussion of certain subgenres of portraiture, such as animal portraits, deathbed portraits, baby portraits, abstract portraits, portraits in absentia, portraits of fictional characters, portraits in absorption, and the ‘portrait historié,’ will prove helpful in making the case against Spinicci and Freeland. Finally, in sections 5 and 6, an alternative account of portraiture is developed, one that seeks to addresses the numerous objections raised against the two competing theories. In a nutshell, it is argued that something counts as a portrait if it is the product of a largely successful intention to create a portrait, and that the intention to create a portrait necessarily involves having a substantive concept of the nature of portraits as well as having the intention to realise that substantive concept by imposing portrait-relevant features on an object. The main advantage of the proposed account is that it is broad enough to include all bona fide portraits, without being meaninglessly broad, and that it is able to accommodate both the changes and the continuity in the practice of portraiture.

2010

Photographs of artists reside in an ambiguous space between subject and object: they are at once a document, a printed record of an artistic act by the photographer (a work of art), and an image, a tonal rendering of a body that once was there (an artist). The artists represented within the unique sub-genre of “photos of artists by artists” are similarly marked by ambiguity, dually positioned as subject and object, maker and image. Yet unlike in other media, such as painting or sculpture, where the surface of the model is always reinterpreted through the hands of the artist, in the photograph the subject dictates their own representation, in that the camera captures a momentary look, flinch, or gesture produced solely through their actions. The photographer may direct, but ultimately the subject determines his or her own performance, which shifts the position of authorship and raises the question: is the photograph a work of art by the photographer (the labor of making) or by the artist in the photograph (the labor of posing)? I suggest that it is both, for the game of photography changes when the subject in front of the lens also identifies as an artist; the institutional binary of artist/model no longer holds. The question is further complicated when viewing photographs of female artists taken by male artists, a relationship already steeped in a long art historical tradition of men making images (out) of women. For example, Man Ray’s photographs of Méret Oppenheim have been read as pure visual objectification of the female artist, as have Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Yet this narrow interpretation denies agency to the women artists represented in the work. I aim to position the photographs of Oppenheim and O’Keeffe closer to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Louise Bourgeois, which exudes a sense of confidence and self-knowledge by a woman who has determined her own performance not solely as object, but also as subject.

Portraiture is a broadly based cultural phenomenon linked to a need to remember individuals for a personal, political, ritual, or social reasons. How an individual’s identity is constructed and presence evoked differs from culture to culture, subject to concepts of individualism, a prevailing aesthetic and a host of social or ritual beliefs particular to a time or place. Three general categories of image emerge from a survey of portraiture across many cultures and time periods, an overview provided in this essay. Discussed in this context are issues of memory, construction of identity, the lens of likeness through which much portraiture is viewed today as a result of the dominance of the Western tradition in art historical studies worldwide, even in cultures where portrait traditions have a long, documented history such as China and Japan, different strategies for identification of the subject such as social role and name, the difficulty of recognizing portraits in cultures where mimetic likeness was not the defining characteristic, and a general conclusion that Western portraiture as it has flourished particularly since the Renaissance with its emphasis on the subject’s physiognomy and psychology is a culturally specific approach that is distinctive and different from the more widespread approach of world portraiture where identity is based on other conventions.

Through the use of various sorts of marks, the photographic essay explores the various modifications that physical alteration of the object can make to an image, a portrait, and its narrative (such as defacements, scratches, and cutouts). The same photo-object was marked with a total of eight distinct sorts of marks to graphically show how the materiality of the photograph may alter how it is interpreted while creating several (open) narratives.

CENTRAL ASIAN JOURNAL OF INNOVATIONS ON TOURISM MANAGEMENT AND FINANCE, 2022

The portrait is perhaps one of the most attractive genres of painting and at the same time ambiguous. The word "portrait" came from the Old French word "pourtrait" which means the image of line to line. In Russian, the word portrait means"similar." It is the portrait that provides the opportunity to talk about the image of a person, allows you to get close to the worldview of personality in various eras. It is interesting to recall a little history of the portrait genre. Especially female portraits of great artists are so unique, you can notice and trace the features of life, clothes of that time. There may be different eras, portrait schools, directions, but in the foreground there is always female beauty and attractiveness. The ideals of beauty at all times were different, but such as Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Daly-all make it clear to us that in practice a female ideal simply cannot exist. The ceremonial portrait is no less attractive, but this is a less common phenomenon in modern art. Art history introduced us to examples of wonderful works that belonged to this species. It is enough to name the names of D. Velasquez, A. Van Dyck, D. Levitsky, P. Rubens. During the evolution of the portrait there appeared stable portrait forms which represent various ways of comprehending man in the history of culture: "Portrait-likeness" the main priority of which is the transmission of physical similarity to the portraitised; " Portrait-status "where the dominant image is the image of a person in his connections with society; "Portrait-mask" hiding the personality behind the variability of the cultural pattern. "Portrait - social type" where the emphasis from the unique, individual is transferred to the transfer of common features of the individual's belonging to a certain social niche; "Portrait-idea" expressing the author's concept of the artist, and "Portrait-soul" addressed to the transmission of the inner world of the individual. The portrait genre has a unique artistic language that makes it possible to comprehend many people..