In her introductory essay to this year’s BP Portrait Awards, Alison Weir said that because of portrait photography the painted portrait has become an anachronism; it no longer requires to be representational since this task has been seized by the camera’s precision. What painted portraiture necessitates today is to be more ‘artful’; to posses the aesthetic appeal that will allow for it to be remembered as the ultimate orchestra of formal artistic elements. This, together with an artist's ability to look beyond the public face of his or her character and reveal the inner being of their subject, Weir says, is the recipe for the survival of portrait painting.
Does Weir suggest that because photography is representational, it automatically assumes the invisible inner being of its subject? Paul Beel spent months preparing his project, his equipment and himself for Epic Mirtiotissa. His nights were passed in local Greek restaurants meeting and getting to know his models before starting the month long painting of his portrait. What is even more surprising is that Beel’s Epic Mirtiotissa was not even a portrait of people. It might have contained people, but as Beel said himself, it was a portrait of a place - of Mirtiotissa beach. And regardless of this, Beel still put aside so much of his time to recruit and connect with his various models, to built relationships with them, win their approval and access their comfort zones.
A portrait photographer on the other hand receives his subject, directs him on where and how to sit or stand and then starts snapping away. With the simple press of a button he supposedly captures the true essence of his sitter. No planning, preparation, subject-artist relationship required? Just the camera - a big black excuse, a metaphor for the replacement of personal communication by technology: We don’t meet, we email; we don’t call, we sms: we don’t talk, we type; we don’t converse, we absorb and observe information through various hardware mediums. We don’t even have to meet someone in person in order to befriend them. These days we just send a ‘friend request’ and judging by the look of our profile picture they can either accept or reject us as friends. The same happens in the photographer’s studio: Accept. Photograph. Reject. 'Thank you very much. Next please!'
I am aware that this is not true for documentary photography. Here photographers often spend weeks, months, even years living with their subjects, getting to know them, understand them and finding the best, most respectful way in which to photograph them. We can then almost equate the making of Beel’s Epic Mirtiotissa with the making of a photo documentary, since he followed the exact same procedure a documentary photographer would, if assigned to document a specific people or place. Why should portrait photography then be any different? Especially when photography already has a reputation for being subjective or ‘cruel’ as Susan Sontag would put it?
Even when an artist succeeds in accessing its subject’s comfort zone, the subject is still exposed to a public or external eye which changes and determines his behaviour, expression or pose. As Roland Barthes said of portrait photography:
In front of the lens, I am at the same time: The one I think I am; The one I want others to think I am, (and) The one the photographer thinks I am...
Roland Barthes also referred to this as ‘the mortification of the subject’. Once aware of public observation i.e. the moment the subject freezes into a pose - there occurs an immediate ‘...Death in person’. Portraits photographs will therefore always remain mere photographs of an individual, not representations of the individual him(her)self. And I am tempted to judge portrait painting by the same measures. Even after extensive subject research, working one-on-one with a sitter for days and weeks on end while painting him(her), it could be argued that it is impossible for an artist to achieve entire objectivity towards his or her sitter. Look for example at Wen Wu’s ‘Venus as a Boy’:
Wu saw her friend as representing the male version of Venus and she decided to paint him in this way as her entry piece for the BP Portrait Awards. The sitter - Wu’s friend - doesn’t necessarily regard himself as resembling Venus. This portrait is Wu’s subject as she sees him, not as he sees himself or as he is in real life. The way in which Wu painted her friend might perhaps also have been influenced by the location, wardrobe, and ideas she had access to or by what she thought the judges of the BP Portraits Awards might appreciate. Taking all this in consideration, very little space remains for the display of the actual inner being of the subject.
We could say that Wu’s ‘Venus as a Boy’ is perhaps rather a representation of the modern male as we know it. None of us would be surprised to hear that our contemporary world overflows with boy Venuses. Very few modern males are strong, tough, mucho, ex-soldier material - like the kind our fathers and our father’s fathers were. Now we are talking skinny boys in skinnier jeans with rosy lips who work in offices, use night cream and book in at male spas. If we look at it in this way, Wu’s portrait makes a strong statement. We could say this is a portrait of the modern male. But not of Wu’s friend. It doesn’t reveal anything of her friend’s character, of his inner being, his essence or whatever form of ‘private self’ he might possess.
Alison Wier also says, because of the high standards of representation set by portrait photography, painted portraits can now no longer just be realistic, they should also be ‘artful’. In order to stand out from the other forms of portraiture, portrait painting now has to speak for art itself and its formal attributes. Colour, line, shape, texture, composition are important elements that will ultimately elevate the reputation of art-for-art’s-sake. This additional requirement subtracts even more space for the revelation of the subject’s inner essence. A subject's naturality now becomes pushed aside, contoured, disfigured and finally abstracted in order to ultimately come alive - not as the voice of the subject him or herself - but as a loud orchestra of multicoloured brushstrokes. This whole seemingly hopeless ordeal of subjective portraiture is revealed in a wonderfully witty way by Cayetano de Arquer Buigas’s portrait entitled ‘Ohh!’ where the sitter - a girl painted in perfect realism - is shocked when confronted with the result of her portrait - an unrecognizable abstraction of herself.
The great abstract artist Paul Klee reckoned: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.’ Portraiture, it seems valid to say - whether photographed or painted - cannot tae credit for Klee's statement. The inner being of a subject can perhaps be advanced toward, but it cannot be approached in its entirety under the conditions of any form of public display. And even more so if the artist - photographer or painter - is a complete stranger to his or her model; it is then when portraiture becomes mere masquerade.
