Any understanding of the formal or expressive elements of the portrait must take into account the expected use of the photograph as well as its intended audience. A portrait made for one's parents, spouse or lover uses a different set of expressions, gestures and settings than a portrait for one's board of directors, audience or electorate. The photographer aims to reveal character through the face, to locate and affirm social status through the subject's relationship to setting, to cast some political or sociological drama, or to utilize the human being as object in some esthetic invention. Portrait photography -- a world of social make-believe, stock poses and standard types -- pictures a homogeneous vision of a society with shared values and common history. Ultimately, portraits are "social documents: again and again, it is not the portraitist's art but the cultural meaning which, along with historical details, gives interest to the photograph."2
Faces is made up primarily of studio portraits of well-known people; fewer than a third of the subjects are anonymous sitters, street passers-by, or genre characters. Most of the identified subjects are men whose class, status or professional achievement merits public curiosity. From Gustave Le Gray's stiff General, Lewis Carroll's dissolute Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Nadar's balding, thin-lipped Baudelaire, to Edward Steichen's moody Rodin and pompous J. Pierpont Morgan, and Alvin Langdon Coburn's studious Alfred Stieglitz, a language of stylized photographic gesture is articulated. The quite casual cigarette, the hand grasping the rich lapel or tucked into the formal jacket, the steadfast eye contact maintained -- this is how writers, artists, actors, politicians, bankers, and the rich and titled are to be seen. Nadar's fat, grumpy Baron Taylor rests a plump hand on a huge stack of leather-bound prop books; Frederick Evan's Aubrey Beardsley displays an effete profile reminiscent of his own drawings. Steichen's Maeterlink looms in a theatrical setting of paintinglike light and shadow. All are removed from the realm of ordinary people, and isolated as icons in perfect frames.
In these early images, women are often more subject matter than they are subjects. Robert Demachy's allegorical Contrasts ( a young black woman/a plaster reproduction of a classical head) and Clarence White's stereotypical Maternal Love typify a concern with graceful subdued gestures, universal symbols, display rather than expression and essence at the expense of detail. Costume is significant here: Stieglitz's Portrait of S. R. hints at a jaunty independence via a mannish hat; Sarah C. Sears's Julia Ward Howe ameliorates the solid severity of that matron with a white lace cap and shawl; Baron Adolphe de Meyer's Mrs. Wiggins of Belgrave Square reveals a touching attempt at fashion through an enormous black silk rose perched resolutely above the broad, plain face. Consistent with the cultural expectations under which they lived, most of the women are not identified with any professions other than mothering, or perhaps being beautiful. If poor, employed or professional women existed, there is little evidence of their existence here.
Paul Strand's Photograph, New York -- the familiar fat, gape-mouthed street woman -- marks a shift of emphasis from personalities to types, in Faces, from the renowned to the ordinary. The concerns of portraiture expand to include human evidence as well as social convention. The class of people portrayed broadens (Strand's photograph is a forceful reminder that not everyone languished in the drawing room), and the photographer works at a greater physical and psychological distance from the subject, permitting the viewer access to details of dress, gesture and environment. Lewis Hine's child laborers are small figures alone amid factory machinery or newspapers (Joe Bodeon and Morris Hurowitz); Albert Renger-Patzsch's handsome worn worker poses in cap and work apron (Arbeiterportrat); Walker Evans's linen-suited black dandy pauses on a busy Cuban street corner (Havana, 1932). The portrait ritual occurs in the context of real lives; the gestures are more like the subjects' own, and the photographic encounter is directed more at understanding the subject than expressing the artist. A rare Ansel Adams work (Graduation Dress) locates an awkward, thin teenager beside a great tree; the potential of the wrong photographic moment is obvious.
If the ordinary and the poor are photographable, the exotic and foreign are more so. Native American portraits by Karl Moon, H. L. Huffman and Adams are instructive in the ethical and sociological questions surrounding ethnographic portraiture. For Moon and Huffman, Native Americans are stoic performers in an ideological costume drama. Bedecked in pipes, beads, feathers and blankets, bereft of authenticity or individual identity, the subjects sit solemnly before studio teepees and painted desert backdrops. Adam's Juan Rancho of Cochito, Pueblo Tribe is undeniable romanticized, but does allow its handsome, sun-creased young subject to emerge as an individual. Dressed in a simple cotton shirt, his hair held back by a knotted scarf, Juan Rancho gazes somewhere beyond the photographer. This is a ritual encounter of equals.
Contemporary portraits in Faces are concerned equally with famous figures and with average folks caught unawares. In the absence of the clearly defined portrait devices which were traditionally employed to signify importance, work by photographers such as Tony Barboza (Portrait of James Van Der Zee) and Yousuf Karsh (Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro) illustrates the curious premise that microscopic examination of pores, larger-than-lifesize prints, and greasy light are means of revealing character or inspiring admiration. Peter Stackpole's witty Alfred Hitchcock, which poses the director with a dumb dog in front of a fake fireplace, and Don Worth's O'Keeffe balance the artifice of arranging the artists in a style derived from their own work by applying some insight into the person of that artist. The difference between Worth's O'Keeffe and Karsh's suggests just how much the subject is raw material for photographers' manipulation -- Worth's portrait is quiet, set in an adobe courtyard full of light; Karsh's seats the painted in a contorted pose before a hard window.
Neil Folberg's portraits exhibit a warm affection for the people he meets traveling (Lubavitcher Rebbe, Brooklyn; Friends, Macedonia and Coffin Maker, Yugoslavia), while Gernot Keuhn's untitled flash image of a ghastly, white-faced matron wearing too much makeup is typical of portraiture which attacks the subject by surprise. In portraiture, the photograph becomes more real than the person who is its subject. In works like Kuehn's and Weegee's, the person who exists in the photograph may not exist in the real world at all. The portrait may well be the perfect act of fiction. Faces, which seems not to pose any intentional questions about the social nature of the portrait, for that very reason offers a rich source of information which might reveal what this ritual performance for the camera is really about.
