Review: Clarke, The Photograph, Chapter 6: The Portrait in Photography, 1997

Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 19th century) -
James Linton, Newhaven Fisherman - 1840–50

Clarke begins his chapter on portraiture with the claim that is it “one of the most problematic areas of photographic practice, … fraught with ambiguity.”  He notes that portraiture was in its early days encoded in the 19^th century practice of oil painting.  This was a highly privileged medium available to only the wealthy and was used as a means of projecting power and status.  He sees the daguerreotype as the perfect portrait medium as it required, like painting, subjects to sit for long periods (relative to photography, that is) and produced a one-of-a-kind original.  

Even in the early days, though, some photographers saw the potential for democratizing portraiture by capturing not only the common man, but also the common setting.  Where portraits were typically done in studios or in the homes of the wealthy, early photographers such as Hill and Adams worked outdoors taking photos of the working class.  Their work is some of the first to question the nature of portraiture.  At what point is a portrait no longer a portrait, but something else, like documentary or street photography?  How much contextualization makes a photo no longer a portrait?  To what degree can or should that contextualization be managed by the photographer, as in Kar’s photo of Ionesco surrounded by stacks of plays, or Sartre with bookshelves and manuscripts?   A carry over from oil portraits was the idea that the portrait captures and presents the inner essence of the individual.  To what degree is that essence captured, to what degree created?  

Where portraits were once produced by highly skilled artists and later camera “operators,” the trend has been toward democratizing the process of portrait creation, which has in fact become the most common form of photography, both for the purpose of governments to identify individuals using its services and crossing its borders, as well as for the average camera owner, for whom, Clarke quotes John Tagg, “photography is primarily a means of obtaining faces they know.” 

Clarke concludes with a review of four modern photographers whose work questions the basis of identity:  Mapplethrope (sexuality), Arbus (gender), Sherman (real vs constructed), and Avedon (who doesn’t quite seem to fit here, except that for being famous he couldn’t be left out;  Clarke justifies his inclusion with reference to Avedon challenging the very process of portrait creation, a rather nebulous claim in relation to the other three photographers with which he is grouped).  Finally, one might ask, though Clarke doesn’t, is the cooperation of the subject a necessary ingredient of portraiture?  Oil painters working with a live subject certainly require some cooperation.  Photographers with fast lenses do not.  

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