The Art of the Portrait

[csant]

portraiture has existed long before photography, but photography has given us the headshot (and its equivalents).

Head (and shoulders) depictions of people go far beyond the history of photography, too. Just think about the ancient Romans… Whether you really want to call them "portraits" is another thing (but then, you brought up passport pictures). Often, though, these close-up portraits were studies in preparation of the "real" work (which sometimes never happened). What the 20th century has done, is to emancipate these "fragments", "studies" etc into its own category of ("unfinished") art.

[archer]

The word portrait has a different meaning to many people. When I think of portrait it means three types of images of a person or persons. The portrait to show the person as he sees himself, with as many of the facial flaws, hidden by lighting or pose, as to tell the truth without harm or flattery. This is the most difficult portrait for it is his likeness of himself, for himself as seen by others, this time, me. The second type is the "environmental" portrait which is the image of the sitter that says what he's about. This is the least difficult portrait and the one most misunderstood and abused. The third portrait is the allegorical portrait which attempts to use the sitter to relate to something that tells why the portrait is being made and what the image is about and this is the most elusive portrait and is usually made by serendipity. All three forms of portraits share one common goal... to tell the truth and to catch the sitter living in that moment and not just visiting for the sake of the image. Knowing the difference is what makes a great portrait.
Denise Libby

[cowanw]

R.E. I think you are right to be sceptical.
Many of the well known portraitists describe similar attributes to the Photographic portrait, making it sound a noble pursuit to reveal or capture the very nature of the sitter in the image. It seems to me though that there is a general failure to account for the third person in the equation, the viewer, who, after the passage of time is the only part of the triad left to pass an opinion.
Was the smiling Churchill (number 2 of Karsh's set) the real Churchill as the family thought or was the more famous "Lion" the real one as the rest of the world thought.
Was Alfred Eisenstaedt's frowning Goebbels the real man or was the laughing playboy of the next second (rarely published) the real man.
I was at the art gallery in Toronto this weekend and saw the Conde Nast exhibition of Steichen's portraits. 9 out of 10 people had no clue as to the identity of any of the portraits. But all were able to offer their (differing) interpretations as to the nature of the sitters.
At the end of the day, I think a great portrait is defined as one that captured the admiration of the total strangers who view it, later, with their totally unpredictable future mentalities. This has much to do with the visual interest of the sitter and with the skill of the photographer, but little to do with the character of the sitter.
Regards
Bill

[paulr]

Head (and shoulders) depictions of people go far beyond the history of photography, too. Just think about the ancient Romans… Whether you really want to call them "portraits" is another thing (but then, you brought up passport pictures). Often, though, these close-up portraits were studies in preparation of the "real" work (which sometimes never happened). What the 20th century has done, is to emancipate these "fragments", "studies" etc into its own category of ("unfinished") art.

I'm using "headshot" not to mean head-and-shoulders (a portrait can be cropped like this too), but to suggest something with more superficial goals than a portrait.

More along the lines of what you describe as fragments or unfished art. Though photography made depiction so easy that these pictures weren't necessarily unfinished ... they were just never intended to show much beyond surfaces.

[Tony Flora]

Was the smiling Churchill (number 2 of Karsh's set) the real Churchill as the family thought or was the more famous "Lion" the real one as the rest of the world thought.

Seems odd to me to think that he might be one or the other exclusively.

[cowanw]

Seems odd to me to think that he might be one or the other exclusively.

Which of course is the point.
No single image can be the whole character of a person; given interpretation by viewers as strangers, a single image could, in fact, be no part of the character of a person.
Regards
Bill

[Mark Sawyer]

Which of course is the point.
No single image can be the whole character of a person; given interpretation by viewers as strangers, a single image could, in fact, be no part of the character of a person.
Regards
Bill

But a portrait can catch the whole character of a person, at that moment in time. We all have a lifetime of different moments, but who we are at any one point in time can be singular. Not simple, but singular. And it may change a moment later, as Karsh's two portraits show...

"Headshots", I think, can be wonderful. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Ver Meer's Girl with the Pearl Earring, Strand's farmboy... just a farmboy intensely staring back at a photographer intensely staring at him, and so still staring down viewers today. Impeccably seen and printed, to give full justice to the eye-contact. That's all it is, and all it had to be to separate it from a million preceding "look at the camera" eye-contact portraits. Maybe you'd have to see that portrait on a cabinet card or in the window of a local commercial photographer to realize what a step away from the ordinary it was. Portraits didn't look like that then. Things are so diluted by generations of repetition today...

Just my reading, but that's all anyone has.

The simplicity of a headshot can let the artist (photographer, painter, or sculptor)unload the responsibility on the sitter. But the sitter invariably loads it back onto the artist. After all, it's just a "headshot". How much could anyone really do with it?

[rdenney]

For all his other magnificent abilities I think Adams was a weak portraitist. IMO, his best portrait is the one he states to be not a portrait. (O'Keefe and Cox) I find many of his portraits to be wooden.

I agree with this assessment. And I think Adams was a weak portraitist because of the statement he made. I see no correlation between posing, repose, contrivance, and character. Most people are contriving to look this way or that, and that contrivance, and the desire to contrive how they look, is as much a part of their character as "repose".

But a portrait can catch the whole character of a person, at that moment in time.

Absolutely. The question is whether the photographer can elicit it, and then push the button when it appears.

I've discussed this at some length with my various art teachers, and they all suggested that a painter has considerable time looking at a subject, and the subject is constantly changing. So the portrait ends up being an amalgamation of all those changes. Each change is motivated by some new feeling on the part of the sitter--humor, happiness, boredom, pain, nostalgia, sentimentality, love--whatever. The portrait might including the "love" eyes and the "humor" smirk, to put it simplistically, which is seen as "capturing the whole person."

The challenge for artists working in those slow media is to capture the gesture of the sitter. I spent long hours in the studio listening to art teachers say "GO!" and frantically sketching live subjects for 15 seconds or a minute. Detail was unimportant but motion and direction was critical. (I sucked at that.) With photography, we have the gesture if we can push the button at the right time, and the challenge for us is to capture more than one dimension or quality. The more we pose the subject to achieve that, the more we have to be in command of the result we desire. (I suck at that, too.)

Personally, I'm happy if the pictures make the sitter look happy and pleasant. Joy and beauty would be even better, if it works out that way. Occasionally, I need for them to look like they know what they are doing (as in professional portraits) without looking angry. And then I'm happy if those images aren't ruined because I screwed up the exposure or didn't focus properly. Much beyond that is beyond my skill.

Rick "who doesn't understand the concept of 'honesty' in portraits" Denney

[paulr]

"Headshots", I think, can be wonderful. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Ver Meer's Girl with the Pearl Earring, Strand's farmboy...

You're using the term to mean exactly what I wasn't. I don't think there's anything of great importance about a particular framing (the standard headshot framing vs. a full body picture, or whatever). I meant to delineate something like an actor's or realtor's headshot from a portrait made by, say, Rembrandt, or Julia Margaret Cameron.

The former is about what someone looks like, maybe with a bit of character or personality (or wishful thinking) thrown in. The latter is about a lot more, which is why we still look at them over a hundred years later.

[rdenney]

The latter is about a lot more, which is why we still look at them over a hundred years later.

I'm not sure that something more has much to do with the sitter, at least in many cases, and I think it has everything to do with what the artist wanted them to be. I'm not sure Leonardo really cared what Mona Lisa really looked like. None of us really know who those Dutch burghers were that Rembrandt immortalized in face but not name, so we have no idea whether what he portrayed was captured or constructed.

That's why I don't understand the notion of honesty in portraiture. If honesty means a plain portrayal, with the hope that the sitter is displaying something significant and the photographer isn't getting in the way, then okay. Painters can do that more easily if they know the sitter or if they have a visualization of what they want the sitter to be. If it means "warts and all", then that subject, as a question of artistic priority, goes all the way back to Akhnaten.

There were painted "headshots" before photography, too. I don't think Gilbert Stuart was establishing the definition of great portraiture with his rendering of George Washington, which is rather bland compared to the reported presence of the real person. I think we remember it because it's on the one-dollar bill. I don't think it's the paint, or the classical technique, that made the famous old portraits great. I think we just see the great ones and the other ones are, at best, waiting in the appraisal line at Antiques Roadshow.

I once, as a child, painted a portrait of an Asian man. I had never at that time in my life met an Asian man, but I knew what I want him to look like, and I knew what I felt when I painted him. I did a charcoal of a man who was an orderly at the nursing home where my grandmother lived, over 30 years ago, and made him look angry (fierce would be a better word) when he wasn't. It was not him at all--I never saw him display anything but gentleness--but it was how I wanted to portray him. I wonder how many great portraits through the ages portrayed someone different than the sitter--someone in the mind of the artist?

Rick "whose informal portraits always seem to work but with no understanding of why" Denney