The Portrait in Photography: 1848-1966

A little more than four hundred years ago Albrecht Durer made a portrait of Erasmus but felt it necessary to protect himself by putting an inscription right in the painting: "If you really want to know what the man Erasmus is like, read his books." A book, either by or about the man, would give information gathered over a longer period than the interval presented in a single picture.

From this reasoning has emerged a criticism of portraiture that persists to the present day: if the time period for gathering information is small, then the amount of information itself must be small.

This criticism seemed even more valid with the advent of photography's "instantaneous" portraiture. Photographs, unlike paintings, were not an integrated synthesis of many observations. Etienne Carjat's photographs of Charles Baudelaire and Giocchino Rossini in the Fogg Exhibition show that by 1865 pictures could come quite close to technical perfection.

It is not only the photographer, however, who faces the problem of using isolated observations out of context. A limit of 1200 pages upon a writer imposes difficulties just as critical as those of one-hundredth of a second upon a photographer. Tolstroy once noted that his primary problem was to select and arrange separate moments taken from continuous time. Discontinuity--inherent in all descriptive or reproductive art--is not in itself a criterion for judging "truthfulness".

Sextuple Exposures

Edward Steichen's portrait of his brother-in-law, Carl Sandburg, clearly illustrates this method of selecting and arranging different images. Steichen printed six different negatives on the same piece of paper and arranged them to show the progressive animation of Sandburg's face breaking into a smile. Such selection can involve choosing one out of 10,000 exposures taken in the span of a second.

The still photographer, however, works within the range of practicality, not possibility. Rather than making a movie and then selecting from thousands of feet of film, he chooses the critical moment in his mind and captures it on film by releasing the shutter at the right time. The 35-mm camera made it practical to compromise between these two extremes. The photographer may make several exposures of one scene and make his final selection again from the film. This is usually the case, and so critics have said that good pictures are just luck. If you take enough pictures, they say, you are bound to get a good expression.

The Critical Moment

This is, of course, to some extent true. But it cannot explain the uncanny ability of a photographer like Henri Cartier-Bresson to capture so many critical moments. In this exhibit, the best example of precision timing is Robert Doisneau's "Le Tableaudans la Vitrine."

Even the problem of composition may be considered a matter of selection. Yet once the choice was made--perhaps destroying three prints of alternative spatial arrangement and then framing the fourth--a particular composition may become so perfect that it's hard to imagine that a real choice has ever been made. Arnold Newman's portrait of Igor Stravinsky and his black piano on a white foreground is one of these unquestionable arrangements.

A portrait is one moment, one composition, and one expression out of an infinite number of possibilities. Because all sides of a person cannot be portrayed, the question of which is the best portrait becomes as complicated as the question of who we are: what we appear to be to others, or what we imagine ourselves to be. Who can make the selection and what are to be his criteria? At the Fogg Exhibition, two quite different portraits of Marian Anderson are hug together. The first is a formal portrait by Yousuf Karsh -- the photographer who took that famous picture of Churchill; the other, a portrait by Richard Avedon, shows Miss Anderson as the eternal siren -- the sad wailer with windblown black hair and a dark face.

>Often No Titles

But the portraits in this exhibition reveal much more than an aspect of one person. For that reason, the subject's name often is not used as the title of the picture. The viewer must put emotion into Marian Palfri's flashbulb picture of the sphinx-faced Negro woman, "Wife of a Victim of a Mob Lynching." A photograph by Dorothea Lange changes from a picture of a smiling grandmother to a beaming representation of boundless green nostalgia: "God Bless Nora Kennally, Country Clare, Ireland."

The selection and placement of the photographs at the Fogg develops several sharp, non-personal themes. Between a Mathew Brady portrait of a group of war-weary generals (close examination reveals that one of them has lost an arm) and two pictures of destitute sons of the Depression, hands Richard Avedon's bitter portrait of the fact of the land. This pictures of a bejeweled back and enormous rump surrounded by 10 formally-dressed old women, is actually "The Generals of the Daughters of the American Revolution."

Four other portraits offer a comment on justice. A sheriff, a destitute migrant mother, and the wife of a lynching victim surround a rich woman who, wrapped in furs and chins, sits inside her elegant charriage. Of the four pictures, only this one has a name-title. On another wall, portraits of three anguished women precede a fourth who is perfectly sharp down to the hair on her chin. She is dead, however.

A group of five pictures (two pairs of women, and three pairs of men)appears to be a chronological survey of the possible relationships between individuals of the same sex. It starts out with a 1920 snapshot of two girls playing on the beach, and ends with a pair of young men wearing black leather jackets, iron crosses, and earrings (through the left ear only). These pictures suggest that people are changing and that they are photographing different subjects.

The "Orientation Response"

Diane Arbus is representative of this modern trend. She has photographed new subjects (transvestites, homosexuals and fat nudists), and in this exhibit has a picture. "Identical Twins" that is quite modern in several aspects. It is a print made from only half of a 35-mm negative that has been enlarged and cropped so that it is surrounded on three sides by thick black lines (the unexposed edges of the film). This produces what is called by scientists the "orientation response," and by artists, a pun on the ambiguous relationship between art (the process of creation) and reality. Remember Blow-Up? The Black line is startling and forces this photograph to be viewed as a photograph, not as a scene through a window. The effect of the black line is re-enforced by the use of a wide-angle lens that distorts the twins and makes them ugly.

Distortions

Current issues of Time and News week provide many more examples of pictures taken with a lens that is just wide enough to produce sufficient distortion for the orienting response. A telephoto lens creates distortion of another sort; distance is compressed rather than stretched out. The use of a long lens in Lisette Model's "Street Scene" results in the compression of an incredibly fat woman into a two-dimensional, half-ton, endomorph.

Even Surrealism has come to photographic portraiture. Harry Calahan has four portraits of Elanor. They are taken over a seven year period, so presumably he knows her fairly well. The most astounding picture portrays Eleanor as the Cross, and the Cross as Eleanor. The cross is formed by the vertical line from the top of her buttocks to her knees, and horizontal line across the bottom of both buttocks. It is called simply "Eleanor." But this is the earliest portrait in the series, and successively larger fractions of her anatomy are included in successive pictures. Again, who is to say which is the "best" portrait?

On the other hand, it would be quite easy to say which are the worst. Any art that is gimmicky or pretentious is bad, but in photography it is especially so because of the credibility of photography. We believe that it is a process which gives us a picture of something that existed, as it existed. Tricks and effects that destroy the credibility destroy the art's most valuable asset.

It would be a great shame to miss this exhibit at the Fogg Art Museum, for it is one of the best exhibits of it kind ever assembled. Indeed, one of the most important functions of art is to give insights into nature, particularly human nature; and inasmuch as a large part of that nature is irrational, photography can convey feelings that words, bound by rational structure, cannot. You have to see these pictures to feel them.