Week 3 Reading

Week 3 Reading: Looking at Portraits:

We do readily recognise the importance of ‘looking right’. We know they are part of how people see each other.

IDENTITY:

• ·        Portraiture is a semiotic event for social identity. Portraits fix our identity in what is essentially an art of description.
• ·        Portraits fix our identity in what is essentially an art of description. Public sphere (passport mugshot), private life (snapshots), social purposes (art, political, medical etc.).
• ·        Portraits are a direct result of the massive impact photography has had. The different uses constitute a large part of the history of photography. A history that shows how portrait photography itself became a values commodity within the nineteenth century industrial revolution.

THE INDUSTRIAL PORTRAIT:

• ·        Development of studio portraiture. Photography became a cheaper and quicker method of making a portrait of someone, as much less labour was involved than in a painting.
• ·        The studio context provided the opportunity for people-clients- to see themselves in a picture as they wished to appear. Social identity became a performance for the camera.
• ·        John Tagg ‘democracy of the image’- photographic portraiture created a situation where it was no longer a privilege to be pictures. The portrait became a means of identification of the population, even though who did not wish to be recognised, like criminals.

MASS PORTRAITURE:

• ·        Aaron Scharf describes how painters were obliged to use photographs as the basis for painted portraits and began to change the conventions of posture and style in their own paintings.
• ·        Disederi’s ‘carte-de-visite’, was easy to carry around and cheap to produce in comparison to whole plate portraits. Cameras like this increased the number of portraits produced from eat plate, cutting the cost of each picture by a quarter or more. This invention also flattered the aspiring classes with images that mimicked the trappings of bourgeoisie settings.
• ·        This revealed the aspirations of the sitter more than their own actual status.  Carte-de-visite photographs emphasised the social aspirations of the sitter, while more up market social portraits emphasised that sitter’s particular personality.
• ·        The combination of social and personal features involved in portraits that lends them their special fascination to questions of identity.

BUREAUCRATIC PORTRAITS:

• ·        With the mechanism of image production, the police, doctors, army, various schools of scientists etc. all developed archives of photographs to be kept and used as evidence.
• ·        The physical appearance of an individual was assumed proof that they were typical of a certain social type whose psychology is indexed to their appearance and can be read off from that visual profile.
• ·        The portrait is a means employed to establish the identity of a sitter, regardless of whether they are viewed as a social problem or a human being with positive features.
• ·        The main arguments about portrait images circulate in relation to questions of social identity and process of identification.

ELEMENTS OF A PORTRAIT:

• ·        All portrait photographs are typically made up of four key elements: Face/pose/clothing/location
• ·        Sub genres of portraiture vary their emphasis on each of these components; each element affects another in the overall potential for meaning.
• ·        Passport photographs- plain background focuses on face of the sitter. Removes potential social connotations. The use of the four elements and their combined relation in the picture are what organises the rhetoric of a portrait.

THE FACE:

• ·        The expression on a face is crucial and can exert a considerable impact on how a portrait signifies meaning. An expression can have a dramatic impact even with the slightest movement. We read these components of the head and face for mood, temperament and character in relation to ethnicity, sex and age and for their ‘attitude’ as well as towards the viewer.

POSE:

• ·        A pose can be a self-consciously adopted manner intended to express a specific cultural identity.
• ·        Whether it is strength or weakness, power or the lack of it etc, the important thing here is to grasp the register in which such connotations take their meaning.
• ·        The pose signifies the art of a good portrait and contributes to the significance of character, attitude and social positon.
• ·        How a person carries their body can be read as embodying their psychological attitude, pointing to a social or sociological grouping and revealing anthropological habits.
• ·        Passport photographs try to abolish all aspects of subjective emotion in the portrait. Attempting neutral codes to see people as they really are.

CLOTHES:

• ·        Clothes indicate a great deal about someone’s social identity and how they relate to it.
• ·        A uniform makes it easy to distinguish a factory worker from a police officer.

LOCATION:

• ·        The setting or background behind the sitter provides a context for the sitter. It quite literally locates the sitter within a social place and we judge their position accordingly.

When talking in class critically about the reading, we focused on the four elements within portraiture.
We highlighted how in contemporary portraiture we are consumed with the art of taking selfies, self portraiture has almost taken over and our appearance has become pivitol in the way we express ourselves over social media. 

We also considered that another element, both for women and men is makeup. We search for ways to find out how to look like people we aspire to be. We look to media sources such as Instagram and YouTube to find videos to teach us how to look like the A list stars. This view of wanting to aspire to be something better through our appearance has been conditioned in our modern culture. 

Another point we made was that our want to be keep with the up and coming trends may not even be a way to stand out, but to keep up with looking the same as everyone else. We may not want to stand out and look different, but by keeping up with trends, we avoid the situation of looking anything other than normal/mainstream.

Therefore we could ask ourselves as to whether modern portraiture has become a problem? We rely on the new technology for selfies, and self portraits. We constantly edit our representation of ourselves to essentially fit in that we become obsessed over it. We focus more on the digital version of ourselves than we do our real self to the point where some people cant even be recognised when comparing their digital and real self.