W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #pierregonnord, #martinschoeller, #tintype, #portraits

Here are some thoughts about portraiture in photography.  Portraits are intended as records or renderings of people, and they are mediated by a number of things: the artist, the process, the intention, the audience, and certainly, the sitter.  There are not enough great ones.  They don’t work.

Legendary photographer Arnold Newman (1918-2006) was convinced “that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is nonsense.  We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals.  The inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even the man himself”*1.

Most photographic portraits are crap.  If you look at the seeming thousands and thousands of them — percentage wise — very few are meaningful.  It’s a short list.  They can be used for identifying people, but they don’t tell the truth.  If you want any insight into a person's soul, a photograph is not the path. 

When I realized that I was consciously committing time to looking at and thinking about photographs as opposed to letting them swirl about me unconsidered, I recognized that I was never attracted much to so-called, straight photography, the in focus, representational stuff.  I like work that is spare and sometimes layered or veiled, the magical and mysterious, the withheld or suggestive.  Give me the metaphor and the simile.  Activate my imagination.  

I have always tried to expand my horizons and to challenge my taste, and I consciously try to sort out what I think about the “straight” stuff, especially pictures of people.

A dozen years ago in Arles, Erik Kessels, the Dutch photographic explorer of the vernacular, remarked that the only photograph he could appreciate in the whole festival was the one on his ID badge.  He was being provocative and honest.  But what work transcends the ID photo?  

Can you capture a person’s soul in a photograph?  No.

However take the case of Martin Schoeller, whose work is direct, intense, clear eyed — literally — and it is impactful.  For the sitter, he or she can say this is what I look like. 

And it isn’t.  Only your mother or dermatologist get this close.  Schoeller sweetens the result with post-production.  The story goes that his studio once lost Angelina Jolie’s mole until he noticed it had gone missing.  It was recovered and reinstated.  Phew!*2  

In this accompanying portrait of me, I would look like the moon if it weren’t for his soft box side lighting and artistic intervention (in other words, PhotoShop cleanup). 

But if you’ve absolutely got to have a portrait, get a Schoeller.  He is like a astronomer looking at all the moons in the universe and taking us there on little trip like the filmmaker Georges Méliès.

It is revealing of something that this work has been mediated, improved as it were.  Everything is an abstraction.  It is a matter of degree. 

Also I know enough to know that I don’t really know what I look like.  

No one does because their experience of themselves is their mirror reflection. It reads differently; left is right and right left.  Got it?  Even the best portraits must be disorienting for the subject.  But as German and typological as the work is, there is some heart beat.  

Look at the eyes.

Some contemporary artists, work through so many layers of the liminal that there is barely the suggestion of a face, let alone identity, but as portraitists, their work is compelling and effective.  It ceases to be important who the sitters are, but we have feelings about them based on the abstracted information in front of us and the power of its suggestibility.  

That nudge to our imagination is what triggers our engagement.  In the centuries of painting, portraits were always interpretations, not verities.

Is there such a thing as a truly representational portrait?  It is all layers.

Forensic portraits — mugshots — depict and capture the sitter, but we are distanced by artless lighting and production.  They are odd, rude, severe and rarely transcend their documentary intention.  Sometimes they’re funny but more often desperately sad and without humanity.

This has to do with the eyes.  There is the often cited primitive notion that the eyes are the portals of or to the soul.*3  Indigenous peoples are suspicious the their souls are being captured in the camera.  

Photographic portraits lack soul.  Whatever they capture, it isn’t a soul released on to the photographic paper.  

As full and daunting as Edward Curtis’ (1868 – 1952) thirty year, eighty nation, two thousand two hundred images “North American Indian” may be, it lived for years as a twenty volume encyclopedic record on library shelves.  Maybe he stole all of those Native American souls because the heart of that project is its size and scale not its emotional life.  There is no soul catching in the pupil-less eye whites of his “Hamatsa Shaman”. 

Another fellow with a systematic approach to looking at faces was Francois Delsarte whose nineteenth century "System of Expression” was used to codify and demonstrate the forms of emotional life to be performed in the theatre.  Delsarte illustrated, in book form, what emotions look like.   Actors could mimic rage or grief or pleasure, but this has little to do with emotions through ones eyes. 

Look to Cicero (106-43 BC) for a classical statement about this: "Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi”.  ”The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter”).*4 

Consider the notion of the “10 o’clock” eye.  We seem to collectively accept that the highlight found or placed at the upper left of the sitter’s eye, the 10 o’clock position, suggests a generally welcoming and pleasant personality offering a warm, unguarded hello.  As a society we seem to have agreed on this collectively.  

On the other hand, the “6 o‘clock eye” is sinister; “3 o’clock” unbalanced, distracted, lost.   Like that.  Francois Delsarte chronicled his too codifying acting expressions literally diagramming rage, sorrow,  melancholy, etc..

In the same fashion in early twentieth century photo portraits, we accept those blazing white eye highlights coaxed out sitters with a key light catching the friendly quadrant of the pupil and further making the point with a whitening drop of potassium ferrocyanide.   Look at Stieglitz, Karsh or Hurrell in Hollywood.  

There is the deliciously obscure phenomenon called the “Obie Eye” in 1930s Hollywood.  One of Merle Oberon’s husbands, cinematographer, Lucien Ballard, fashioned a light on the side of the camera to limn intense beauty and passion and distract from  some lighten some scarring on her face.  

It is all in the lighting.

I think we are deceived that the realistic, non abstract picture is somehow more honest or more accurate.  This whole eye highlight business is a convention that we subscribe to when looking.

The artist Pierre Gonnord recognizes this.  He has the brilliance to cast his portraits with otherly, craggy faced, well seamed and grizzled gypsies or coal streaked miners.  The large swimmy eyes shine.  The “10 o’clock” highlight is managed smartly; it is welcoming and benign, sympa- and empa-thetic.  

He has understood the odd appeal and immediacy of the Margaret Keane “big eyed” waif from the 1960s and made it work photographically. 

A bit of an exception to this may be the above mentioned Arnold Newman, an “environmental portraitist” in whose images the surrounding context is as relevant as anything.  Or Annie Leibovitz who is widely/wildly successful.   She strikes me as a brilliant caricaturist, like Daumier, able to elicit a response from the viewer in very quick strokes.  She props and styles, and lights and composes, her pictures ingeniously.  Her classic portrait of Meryl Streep in whiteface is iconic, immediately recognizable as pure comedy and tragedy.  But we still don’t feel much.

Considering the Martin Schoeller image of me, I am intrigued by the odd line of my lip, turned upwards on one side (happy/comedy) and downwards (sad/tragedy) on the other — the full spectrum of feeling? 

The eyes aside, Mark Twain said "I think a photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.”*5 

The greatness of a photograph for me is that ability of the artist to insist to the viewer on collaboration.  The artist arranges some information, just enough to involve you, to interest you and to stir a uniquely personal response.  You fulfill the picture; you give it meaning.   It’s about you.  

Here is a statement from Richard Avedon, premiere portraitist, “I am not necessarily interested in the secret of a person. The fact that there are qualities a subject doesn’t want me to observe is an interesting fact.  Interesting enough for a portrait.  It then becomes a portrait of someone who doesn’t want something to show.  That is interesting.  There is no truth in photography.  There is no truth about anyone’s person.  My portraits are much more about me than they are about the people I photograph.  I used to think that it was a collaboration, that it was something that happened as a result of what the subject wanted to project and what the photographer wanted to photograph.  I no longer think it is that at all.  The photographer has complete control, the issue is a moral one, and it is complicated.  Everyone comes to the camera with a certain expectation ,and the deception on my part is that I might appear to be indeed part of their expectation.  If you are painted or written about, you can say: but that’s not me, that’s Bacon, that’s Soutine; that’s not me, that’s Celine.”*6 

It doesn’t matter to me where in the spectrum from representation to abstraction — it can be anything, big and bright eyed or an amorphous oval or even evocative still life.  Its success depends on the artistry and how we are directed through whatever barely perceptible layers have been set in front of us. 

Then there is the notion that good portraits, photographic and other, are self-portraits of the artist.  I was doing a walk through of a collection of portraits in my collection in arles in 2005 saying “here I am as a baby, here I am as a young child, here I am as an adolescent, here I am an old man, dead man, etc. coming at last to Avedon’s classic portrait of Sophia Loren, stopping and offering, “and here I am as a beautiful woman!”*7  

The maker of the attached hand colored tintype of the young man in a bow tie had the brilliance to hand apply the highlights.  There is something uncanny about the portrait that is hard to recognize.  It is not the skill or appeal of hand coloring, the blush in the cheek.  Only when you hold the piece in your hands and hold it in a raking light that you realize that the highlight in the eye is 3D.  The artist has hand applied two white dots.  This is something that you see in Steichen-era portraiture or in the afore mentioned Oberon eye.  Here is a earlier effort.

My point is that if the eyes are the portals of the soul *6, they might as well be shut.

*1 Arnold Newman source?

*2 Conversation between the author and Schoeller’ studio manager, 2010

*3 Matthew 6:22-24 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

*4 Cicero Cicero (106-43 BC) "Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi”.  ”The face is a picture of   the mind as the eyes are its interpreter”

*5 The eyes aside, Mark Twain said "I think a photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.”

*6 Richard Avedon, Interview, Egoiste, September 1984

*7 W.M. Hunt in conversation with Francois Hebel, Rencontres d’Arles, 2011

Note: A contemporary version of this can be witnessed in “Physogs: The Novel Card Game, a board game from the 1940s about physiognomy, the practice of determining an individual’s character based on their facial features. The game is based on sociologist Jacques Penry’s “Character from the Face,” which guides readers through using distinctive facial features as a means of identifying personality traits by matching those with descriptive text cards. 
All the models are white and the thinking behind this is dated and appropriate as a curiosity of the period.  It is a cautionary tale taking character description as the means of describing the physical characteristics of an individual along the lines of looking at eye highlights and acting tropes

©2021  

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