Course

P17. Lifting the Mask We All Wear
The Art of Photographic Portraiture
WC 2151
The Holy Grail of photographers ever since the invention of the Daguerreotype
has been to capture the likeness of the human face. The necessarily long exposures
made portraiture at first, impossible and later, difficult for the Daguerreotypists,
yet they made some remarkable likenesses which went beyond the limitations of
their technology. One which springs to mind is a widely exhibited daguerreotype
by an unknown photographer, usually identified as Uncle George and Gus.
Unidentified Photographer: Uncle George & Gus
Daguerreotype, circa 18531
Writing about the man and boy in this
photograph in 1995, Taylor Holliday said:
Of course, they could never have guessed
where their picture would end up 150
years later. But the photographer—I don't
think it would have surprised him at all.2
David Octavius Hill:
Portrait of Robert Adamson,
c. 1843, calotype
Of course, we have seen many excellent
portraits, particularly those by Julia Margaret
Cameron, Matthew Brady and others from the
early history of photography, but one which
stands out  for me  is by Scots
photographer David Octavius Hill of his
partner, Robert Adamson, taken in 1843.
Although the exposure time would have been
1
http://www.photographymuseum.com/master1.html
Taylor Holliday, "The Daguerreotype's Legacy: Portraits for the Masses" in The Wall Street Journal, September
14, 1995
2
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long, the intensity of expression and insight into the character of the man ranks it,
in my view, with the far more famous portraits of more modern times. But talk of
modern times and the words "photography" and "portrait" for many evoke one
name above all others, the legendary Karsh of Ottawa.
Karsh of Ottawa (1908-2002)3
Yousuf Karsh C.C4., was ethnically Armenian, born in Turkey in 1908. When he
was 14, his family fled to Syria to escape the persecution which followed the
Armenian Genocide in 1915. When he was 16, he was sent to live with his uncle,
a photographer, in Canada. He was "discovered" by the Canadian Prime Minister,
Mackenzie King who persuaded visiting foreign dignitaries to sit for the young
photographer. Fame came to Karsh when Winston Churchill sat for him while on a
visit to Canada in 1941. The resulting portrait
is said to have been the most reproduced
photograph in history.
Yousuf Karsh
Winston Churchill, "The Roaring Lion"
1941
Harry Palmer: Yousuf Karsh, 1991
Later, telling the story of how the
portrait came to be made, Karsh
revealed he had only 2 minutes of the
great man's time and that Churchill
had scowled throughout, "regarding
my camera as he might regard the German enemy." When Karsh removed the
cigar, Churchill placed his hand on his hip and faced the photographer, his scowl
turned to anger. Later, seeing the portrait, Churchill said: "You can even make a
roaring lion stand still to be photographed." Karsh called the portrait The
Roaring Lion.
3
Photos by Karsh are all taken from Masters of Photography,
http://masters-of-photography.com/K/karsh/karsh.html
4
Companion of the Order of Canada, conferred 1990. He was previously an Officer of the Order of Canada,
conferred in 1967.
2
Most of Karsh's portraits were taken in the studio using the studio lights, of which
he was a master, not only to show the sitter's face but separately, his or her hands.
Even so, it was his philosophy to seek for that moment of truth, the decisive
moment as Henri Cartier-Bresson would say, which revealed the inner person to
his camera:
Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is
my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a
small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye,
a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost
selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the
photographer must act or lose his prize.5
Dieter Vorsteher, writing in the introduction to Yousuf Karsh: Heroes of Light and
Shadow6, said of Karsh:
His works have their roots in the high art of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury portrait paintings - in defining and illuminating the uniqueness of
the personality, in profiling the autonomy of the individual. He crystallizes
his models and sets them in auras of light, their facial landscapes becoming
dramatic interplays between light and shadow.
It was a mark of his success that Karsh photographed 51 out of the 100 people
named by the International Who’s Who in the year 2000 as the most notable
people of the 20th century. A small selection
follow:
Yousuf Karsh
George Bernard Shaw
1943
5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yousuf_Karsh
Yousuf Karsh, Dieter Vorsteher and Janet Yates: Yousuf Karsh: Heroes of Light and Shadow, Deutsches
Historisches Museum, 2001
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3
Yousuf Karsh
Humphrey Bogart
1946
Yousuf Karsh
Albert Einstein
1948
Yousuf Karsh
Ernest Hemingway
1957
Yousuf Karsh
Estrellita Karsh
1963
Or, when he grew tired of celebrities who  by the end of his life  had come to
view sitting for Karsh as an obligation to posterity, he occasionally turned his
camera on people who were not household names:
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Yousuf Karsh
Farmer by His House
c. 1952
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Always relying on available light7, Cartier-Bresson produced some memorable
portraits in his day. Some of these were:
(left) Henri Cartier-Bresson: Jean Paul Satre, 1946
(below) Henri Cartier-Bresson: Marcel Duchamp, 1968
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Henri Matisse, 1944
7
A technical term meaning no supplementary light sources, such as flash or studio lights were used in the making
of a photograph.
5
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Barbara Hepworth, 1971
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Colette and her
partner, Pauline, 1952.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Marilyn Monroe, 1960
Richard Avedon (1923-2004)
Andy Bey, Richard Avedon, Herb Jordan at
Avedon's Studio 20048
Richard Avedon was born in New
York to a Russian-Jewish family.
His father gave him a Rollei as a
going-away present when he joined
the Merchant Marine in 1942. Two
years later, he returned to New York
and began work as an advertising
photographer for a department store
but was "discovered" and recruited
to Harper's Bazaar. He later also
worked for Vogue and Life. From the mid-60s on, he photographed the Civil
Rights Movement and protests against the ViewNam War, and much later, the fall
of the Berlin Wall. In 1979 he commenced what many regard as his magnum opus,
8
Photoshoot 2004 for the New Yorker magazine - not too long before Avedon's passing. From
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51267183@N00/92022505/
6
In the American West, in which he photographed
among others, grimy oil-field workers, down-andouters, and teen-agers.
Cover of Richard Avedon's book,
In the American West. 9
Avedon is regarded as a minimalist photographer in
that he poses his subjects usually head-on against a
blank background. He also characteristically made
very large prints.
Richard Avedon: The Beatles, 1967.
(above) Richard Avedon: Bob Dylan, Singer,
New York City 2nd October 1965.
(right) Richard Avedon: Truman Capote, New York 10
October 1955.
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from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Avedon
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Richard Avedon: Marcel Duchamp, 1958
Richard Avedon: Marilyn Monroe,
New York 1957
Richard Avedon: His Holiness The Dalai Lama, India 1998
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989)10
Few photographers have caused as much controversy and political heat as New
York's Robert Mapplethorpe. Exhibitions have been closed, funding cut off or
refused by Act of the US Congress, to prevent the public viewing the work of this
Robert Mapplethorpe: Two selfportraits, 1980 and 1986
respectively.
highly talented and provocative  I would say, innovative  photographer.
There are two sides to Mapplethorpe: one is the photographic artist renowned for
his focus of formal beauty, telling portraits and great technical mastery of his
medium. The obverse of this coin is the man who thrust S&M sex and his own
10
Unless otherwise stated, the images for Mapplethorpe are from
http://masters-of-photography.com/M/mapplethorpe/mapplethorpe.html
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homosexuality in the face of America. The two sides to Robert Mapplethorpe 
who, by the way, almost certainly saw himself as a whole man, not a split
personality  can be seen in two self-portraits, the one, bare-chested and in drag
make-up, taken in 1980, and the other, in black tie formal wear, taken in 1986.
Robert Mapplethorpe: Patti
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Smith,1986 and (right)
Albrecht Dürer: Self-Portrait in
a Fur Coat, 150012.
Robert Mapplethorpe: Patti Smith 1979
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One of Mapplethorpe's best-known portraits is on
singer Patti Smith with whom he shared an apartment
in the Chelsea Hotel, in New York. This was
inspired by a self-portrait by Albecht Dürer (14711528). While the historical reference is clever,
personally I find the 1979 photograph with doves
more telling.
Another well-known portrait by
Mapplethorpe is of the provocative Frenchborn NY sculptor, Louise Bourgeois who is
shown, holding a giant phallus under her
arm.
Robert Mapplethorpe
Louise Bourgeois, 1982
11
http://www.postmodern.com/~fi/pattipics/htm/somwom4.htm
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/durer/self/
13
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/09/25/Patti-Gloria
12
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Ken Moody
1983
Mapplethorpe's photos are often difficult to
categorise. For example, is his 1983 study of
Ken Moody a portrait? It is a very beautiful
study of a man with no hair anywhere on his
head or upper torso (or anywhere else for all
we know), reminiscent of another of
Mapplethorpe's photographs, the marble
head of Apollo...
Robert Mapplethorpe
Apollo, 1988
We get into deeper waters when we try to
define the following photographs, both of
which the models would claim express
deep, inner aspects of their identities. In the
first we at least see the men's faces:
Robert Mapplethorpe
Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter
1979
Robert Mapplethorpe
Joe
1978
In the second, even the face is forbidden
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to us, yet surely it too is more personal than a mere record of a human fetish?
It was images like these which brought the police to the doors of the ViceChancellor of an American university. When a student took some copies of several
Mapplethorp photographs to the drug store to have them developed, intending to
use them to illustrate a term paper, the pharmacist called the police then who
confiscated the book from the University Library. Wikipedia summarised what
followed:
The book in question was Mapplethorpe, published by Jonathan Cape 1992.
The university Vice-Chancellor, Dr Peter Knight, supported by the Senate
took the view that the book was a legitimate book for the university library
to hold and that the action of the police was a serious infringement of
academic freedom. The Vice-Chancellor was interviewed by the police,
under caution, with a view to prosecution under the terms of the Obscene
Publications Act. This Act defines obscenity as material that is likely to
deprave and corrupt. It was used unsuccessfully in the famous 'Lady
Chatterley's Lover' trial. Curiously the police were not particularly
interested in some of the more notorious images, nor any of the images of
children, which could have been covered by other legislation. They focused
on one particular image, 'Jim and Tom, Sausalito 1977'.
Robert Mapplethorpe: Grace Jones, 1984
...... After a delay of about six months the affair
came to an end when Dr Knight was informed
by the DPP that no action would be taken as
'there was insufficient evidence to support a
successful prosecution on this occasion'. The
original book was returned, in a slightly
tattered state, and restored to the university
library.14
Less controversial was Mapplethorpe's image
of Grace Jones, but is it a "portrait"?
To be or not to be a portrait
There is no uncertainty in our minds that the images Karsh made in his studio of
the great and famous of his day were "portraits". They conform to the canons of
portraiture familiar to us from 19th and 20th Century paintings. His stark profile of
Estrellita Karsh is more photographic, but still  I would say  a "portrait".
14
http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Robert_Mapplethorpe
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The images by Henri Cartier-Bresson owe nothing to painting and are purely
photographic in their conception. Does that mean they lose the power of
"portraits" and become instead "candid studies"? And when you remove the facial
features of the sitter, as Mapplethorpe did, are the photographs still portraits even
though they represent important aspects of the people captured for that moment?
Casting back to Karsh's explanation, that Within every man and woman a secret is
hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can...15 we have to ask
what kind of secrets and how many of them have to be revealed to make a
photograph a portrait? I don't think I can answer that, but I can give you with a
practical example to consider….
You do not know the people whose images have been presented here so you have
no way of assessing how characteristic of the sitter his or her photograph might be.
But you have had the opportunity to get to know me while I have been presenting
this course: so, consider the picture taken of me by Pedro Fortunato in Lisbon in
2002:
Pedro Fortunato: Bob Hay, Lisbon 2002
This is one of a long series of
taken of me as part of a final
Pedro's university course.
this, I see a kind of imperious
which I would not normally
myself.
photographs
assignment in
When I look at
me, a hauteur
associate with
Is this a secret revealed? Only
can decide if you believe it is.
you, the viewer
But let me leave you with one
final image, this
time by an architect who not
only had an
illustrious career as a
photographer,
but is also remembered as the author of The Complete Photographer and other
technical manuals which have been basic to the progress of photography in the
second half of the 20th Century. Himself a photographer for Life Magazine,
Andreas Feininger (1906-1999) photographed Magnum member, Dennis Stock in
1951. His photograph is surely the ultimate portrait of a photojournalist!
15
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yousuf_Karsh
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Andreas Feininger:
Portrait of Magnum photojournalist, Dennis Stock.
195116
_________________________
16
www.monroegallery.com
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