Portrait Photography: Sitting Through Ages

          Portrait Photography: Sitting Through the Ages

           Portrait Photography began virtually when the camera was invented in 1839. Defined as a physical representation of its subject, the portrait has developed cyclically from an object for promotion and self exaltation, to that of a spiritual and cultural revelation, and back again. Throughout history, the representation of the most unique and identifying part of a person's body has been a prevalent part of humanity's pursuit towards autonomy and documentation. With this as a foundation, I will demonstrate the development of photography from its original historical and grandiose roots into an exploration of the human interior through the viewpoint of the power struggle between the photographer and the photographed and how, through a questioning of its own self-determined definition, it has come back full circle.

          From the original invention of the daguerreotype to the employment of the wet-plate collodion process, the camera developed from being a sought after luxury into a factory for reproducibility. A photographer by the name of George K. Warren latched onto this idea in 1851 and launched his own photography studio, creating and selling the first yearbook ever to be created. As he traveled around to Universities such as Brown, Dartmouth, and even as far as the University of Michigan, he created easy to print, handheld representations of the education, friendships, and careers that had been built in the last four 

years. His creation of a commercialized, "personalized experience" within the yearbook represents the beginning of the portrait photography movement in its normalization and popularization of the stoic, far reaching gaze and the collection of the slight variations of bone structure and poses which represented your peers, professors, and friends. Through this farce of a connection, the realized intentions of the portrait are revealed; however, according to the Smithsonian not all of his customers were happy. Their claims that they felt he had not "captured [them] at their most handsome" or that they wanted their eyes to be "more expressive" than the picture depicted demonstrates the importance of giving others a physical object representing the zenith of one's vanity rather than the sentiment behind the gift that truly mattered. This documentation and distribution of oneself and the power of the sitter upon the photograph represents the focus of the first period of portrait photography and the foundation from which all others would try to rebel.

  

                

            As commercialized photography became more populous, photographers began to stray away from the stiff poses and precise clarity that was in high demand. One photographer who spearheaded this movement was Julia Margaret Cameron. Deviating from the norm she dismissed the use of head braces for more natural poses producing works of a "softened" and "sculptural" nature. By making the lens of her camera slightly out of focus she purposefully removed the harsh edges creating an instilled sentimentality that was unseen before this time. This photo recreation of her work entitled "Passion Flower at the Gate" emulates the sculptural and at ease essence that pervades her photography. The blurred edges around the outside of the photograph and the soulful gaze into the distance helps to portray the subtle undertones of emotion that pervaded her photos. Only twelve years after Warren opened his studio, Cameron was shifting the power roles within photography, taking control of her aesthetic desires over those of the consumer majority, and producing photographs that attributed the Christian focus of her works towards a modern day viewer.

           Progressing from Cameron's ethereal photography, a new movement emerged in the late 1890s and early 1900s that distanced itself even further from the commercialized world of sit-and-freeze portrait photography. As a part of the Pictorialist movement, Gertrude Kasebier represented a period in which the "temperament, soul, [and] humanity" of a subject was the main focus of the photograph. Through the refusal to use manufactured photographic printing papers, Kasebier rejected the production line quality of the photographs of the day and introduced the beauty of the visibility of the artist's hand. This softened the focus even further and allowed a manipulation of the monochromatic highlights and shadows within the dark room. Charles Caffin, an art critique of the time, described her work beautifully stating that she is "not merely posing her figures, she composes them with the surroundings....[to] help to elucidate the character." Kasebier's style of photography challenged the photographer to include emotion without creating a personal connection through the sentimentality of Cameron's previous work, therefore shifting focus even further away from the subject themselves towards what the photographer wanted them to convey.

              The emotion Kasebier began to embed within each of her photographs was still ever present in the 1930s when Dorothea Lange took one of the most famous photographs of all time: "Migrant Mother." This picture of a woman and two of her seven children working in the fields of Nipomo, California can be established as the beginning of the popularization of a darker, more dramatic photography. Lange, as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, became a part of the effort to document the suffering present due to the Great Depression. Stark grays and dramatic shadows create a contrast within the pictures that parallels those present between the socioeconomic classes of America after World War I. The picture I took represents this movement in the darks shadows and damaged subject matter that pervades the entirety of the frame. By representing the "sitter" in their most vulnerable states, both the photographers of the time as well as myself take full possession of the power available within photography and create a dominance that only weakens the subject further. Beyond this establishment of a more distinct hierarchy within photography, the photographers have gone even further by manipulating the lighting to create darkened shadows where the eyes should have been. Through this, they go so far as to remove that which we distinguish our humanity and identity by to create a shell with which any viewer can fill with their own emotion.

              In a distinct shift from the dehumanizing and emotionally tolling period of the 1930s, the 1950s were filled with the first Technicolor pictures ever produced. In 1907, the Lumiere brothers' Autochrome was the first commercially successful product to process pictures in color. Through the use of several varnishes, the Lumiere brothers' shifted the photographic atmosphere from one of tragedy and the dominance of the photographer to one of pure vanity. 

Nickolas Muray, a Hungarian born photographer of the early to mid 1900s , was extremely influential within this movement, taking pictures with a sort of airbrushed and luminescent quality quintessential of the day. Within my photographic reenactment of his cover photography of Janet Leigh, I used large amounts of saturation and enhanced the reds and blues of the photograph in order to put across the most vibrant, hyper-realistic photograph possible. With the invention of the Technicolor camera came the refusal of the sitters to pose for the wants of the photographers.  Through the lowered economic levels caused by the Great Depression and the limited ability of the majority of the population to spend money on luxuries such as this, a return of the elitist customer base took place. With limited subjects and supplies, photographers were forced to give up power back to the will of the customer, and their overly glamorous ways. 

                In the refusal of the most recent flattery photography, Richard Avedon pioneered the movement towards that of a psychological nature. By returning to the ways of high contrast and subjects abundant in imperfections, Avedon took photographs that assaulted you, made you question what they were thinking and what caused them to be this way. I took several different photographs to represent this era because of the difficulty with which capturing the deeper meaning behind the photographs presented. I used the deep shadows in juxtaposition with the luminosity surrounding them in order to create the illusion of multiple layers with pointed flaws. This created an atmosphere of increased vulnerability as well as pointed aggression towards the viewer as if in blame. 

This new form of modernism, to quote Shannon Perich, the author of "The Changing Face of Portrait Photography," "embraced abstraction by paring down composition, color, and shape to their essential form and meaning." This is the reason Avedon created photographs in which the background details, and even color, were eliminated in order to resonate the meaning laying within.

            

                As society progressed through peace and conflict, success and economic downturn, the 1990s brought about a new and more recognizable form of portrait photography: that of the unfiltered social commentary. Rising from a blending of photojournalism and documentary photography, the most recent popularized form of portrait photography is used to expose that which we find uncomfortable. One photographer named Lauren Greenfield took on the task of photographing women and their issues with body image and eating disorders. In my attempts to recreate examples of her photos, and specifically of this era, I used an over saturation of color to create a stronger and bolder tone. With this I enhanced the shadows of the curves of the human body to create a more dramatic form of isolation within these photos. These effects created photographs that looked realistic so that we could relate to them and yet slightly exaggerated in order to increase the presence of the details with which the discomfort is made.

                Throughout each of these periods of portrait photography, there has been an overall power struggle between the photographer and the "sitters." As each takes the dominant role, the other fights off their submission and the cycle begins again. Within this is always an indicative layer of the socioeconomic status of the mass public. If there are surpluses and periods of growth such as in the 1950s movements of Technicolor with Muray. If there are declines in wealth and great economic strife then the photographer, as in Dorothea Lange's case, takes control. As this continued, it created an entire movement of conceptual photography in which every social dictation of what should be the structure of a photograph was broken, twisted, and re-materialized into a new form in which the photographer could be the photographer and the sitter all at once. This can be seen most distinctly within Lee Friedlander's exhibit and book entitled "In the Picture" and his persistence to simply stand in front of the camera with no change to his facial expressions and push the button. This apathetic regard towards the two most basic roles within photography represents this most current wave of photography. Whatever you know you don't know. Whatever you have done you don't do. Whatever you may think it is to be a photograph, someone else thinks differently.

Works Cited

Perich, Shannon Thomas. The Changing Face of Portrait Photography: From Daguerreotype to               

          Digital. Washington, DC: National Museum of American History, 2011. Print.

O'Neill, Claire. "Lee Friedlander Goes To Yale." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 17 May 2013.