Object Lessons

A portrait!

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound.  Charles Baudelaire

Telling Portraits

Portraits were once the exclusive province of monarchs and nobles, symbols of privilege and prosperity. With the development of the daguerreotype in 1839, working class people soon had a means of capturing their own likeness inexpensively and, by 1901, cameras like Kodak’s Brownie became so affordable, anyone could take pictures!

Andy Warhol, one of the most influential artists of the 20^th century, comes closest to the notion of the valet de chambre or court painter. He, himself, was famous as a chronicler of the rich and famous, though his monumental paintings began as the humble Polaroids on view here. Similarly, photographer Hans Neleman records not only the likeness of his subject, but also the rich tradition of tattooing known as ta moko, a practice that signals one’s status within Maori society. In contrast, Sean Kernan’s subjects are kept separate and apart from society. Locked behind the walls of maximum security prisons, we are offered only fractured features reflected in a mirror, the very inverse of celebrity and rank.

Taking pictures of people as they move about their day, unaware they are being observed, is at the very heart of candid photography.  Renowned street photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, conveys a bit of humor with his “portrait” of a small child laboring to carry a portrait as large as herself. Larry Silver takes unplanned photos of people and situations as well. As a little boy gazes off into the distance unaware of Silver’s presence, his puppy stares directly into the camera lens. With over one hundred Rolling Stone covers to his credit, the celebrated portrait photographer, Mark Seliger, caught this young girl contributing her teddy bear to one of the many memorials that materialized in New York City after 9/11. These photographs are not meant to document a particular person, but rather, to capture “decisive moments” as they unfold.

Material, motion and mood are employed by Robert Klein, Kenda North and Deborah Dancy to reveal, instead of a likeness, the personality of their subjects. A woman, fully clothed replete with red shoes, is seated at the bottom of a pool; another woman dances with her mother’s wedding dress while an “empty suit” leans against a lamp post. Sensitive and poetic or social and political, image by image, these photographs create portraits that both show and tell.