‘Untitled, from America’s Stage: Times Square, 2019’ by Betsy Karel
“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” Richard Avedon
Consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or the Rembrandt self-portrait in Kenwood House, London. We witness the profound skill of two of the greatest painters in conjuring from brush and pigment the endlessly beguiling mysteries of the human face. We have two masterly visual philosophers to explore the largely immutable and terrible question of our mortality. We have two iconic images from which mousemats and other eminently saleable items of merchandise can be manufactured, two iconic objects upon which tourists can turn their backs in order to include them in their own smartphone “selfies”.
‘The morgue (death unknown), 1992’ by Andres Serrano/Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
But also consider this. What if, as well as the paintings, we had photographs of La Gioconda or Rembrandt van Rijn? No matter how highly we might rank the paintings in the pantheon of the world’s art – at the very pinnacle surely – and no matter how competent or inept the hypothetical photographs might be, the camera must always beat the painter’s hand and eye in one respect.
No matter how skillful, intelligent, insightful or cunning the vision of either Leonardo or Rembrandt, the painted portrait is an interpretation. No matter how diligent or wilful the artist was in his attempt to create an accurate physical likeness, the painted portrait is an approximation. To be sure, we can be reasonably certain, perhaps even 99.9% certain, that La Gioconda or Rembrandt “looked” like that. We can also contend that in matters of artistry, aesthetics, psychological insight – indeed any way you might like to cut it – the painting must be judged superior. But compared with the photograph, the painting, superior or not, is a fiction. The photograph is blessed, or in some eyes tainted, with the whiff of reality.
‘The conspirator Payne, 1865’ by Alexander Gardner
Surely though, as Richard Avedon, one of the greatest of photographic portraitists, indicates above, is not the photograph also a fiction, an interpretation? Indeed – Avedon is elucidating the fundamental paradox of photography. He declares that all photographs are accurate, but that none are the truth. Photography, in short, is both objective and subjective, unlike painting, which can only be subjective. Painting’s subjectivity derives from the painter, photography’s subjectivity from the photographer. Photography, however, has that additional element of objectivity, deriving from the camera.
A photograph is the product of both art and science. Indeed, in its early days, photography was known as the half art, half science, the science being regarded as more important than the art. Photography’s pioneers were astonished at and appreciative of the fact that a graphic image could be a self-made trace of actuality. A photographic portrait is literally a spectral trace of a human being.
‘Frederick Douglass, c 1847- 52’ by Samuel J Miller
Thus, if we had a photograph of either La Gioconda or Rembrandt we would, so to speak, have them. We would be looking directly at them, at a particular moment in time in the 16th or 17th century, as if we had walked into a room and met them. The visual contact is startlingly direct, because the camera would have frozen them in time, and we would be looking, not at an iconic, antique cultural artifice, as in the case of the painting, but at an actual trace of a long-dead human being.
Only preserved human corpses, such as Egyptian mummies, or Pompeiian body casts (in themselves displaced interpretations), bring us into such direct contact with departed souls; but such relics preserve the dead, exhibiting, to varying degrees, the degradations or ravages of death. The photograph, in essence, preserves the living. It is a trace of life, not death.
‘Lilly, Rose and Scar in Café Lehmitz, Hamburg, 1967’ by Anders Petersen
This is an edited extract from Best Face Forward: Some Thoughts on the Portrait Photograph by Gerry Badger, published by Prestel, £40. Badger is a recipient of the RPS J Dudley Johnston Medal.
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