The Modern Portrait: Photography
Since its invention in the early nineteenth century, one of the main uses of photography has been portraiture. Given its exceptional veracity, photography was an ideal medium for this use. Over the decades, however, many artists discovered that in addition to its ability to produce a seemingly exact and naturalistic image of the subject, photography had the capacity to express subtle shades of personality and mood, and even, to fictionalize the sitter. Some artists, such as Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and Julia Margaret Cameron, took this quintessential modern tool and used it to create images that appeared to have been taken in ancient times.
Other artists combined the portrayal of particular subject with a keen attention to the formal, abstract properties of composition. Ilse Bing's self-portrait emphasizes spacial and technical issues over emotional and psychological concerns, while Peter Hujar's portrait of Susan Sontag has a severe, almost sculptural formality. In addition, John Guttman's portrait of a clown balances a striking perpendicular composition with a wonderfully evocative subject. Some artists exploited the inherent properties of photography to capture a sense of motion, as in Tim Gidal's intense diptych of the Austrian writer Karl Krauss giving a public speech. Others, like Anne Brigman, incorporated non-photographic elements, such as the halo-like rays in her portrait, Saint Gustav, to accentuate the character of the photographic image.
We are grateful to Richard Lorenz, whose generous loans from his collection make this presentation possible.
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Julia Margaret CameronEngland, born in India, 1815-1879 . Elaine (from The Idylls of the King) . 1874 . albumen print
. 1995.68
Purchase made possible by a bequest from Phoebe Apperson Hearst