THE FAMOUS, THE INFAMOUS, THE ANONYMOUS

A History of Portraiture in Photography

Lorraine Anne Davis, Curator

Nancy Cantwell, Project Director

Introduction

The recording of likenesses has been integral to the preservation of mankind’s short history on earth. Great men and women have found their faces etched onto money, chiseled into marble, poured in bronze, and applied to canvas. However, since the advent of photography, portraiture has become democratic, doing away with a class system that separated those who could afford to have their portraits done, from those who have long faded into a faceless past.

Thanks to Kodak, The Anonymous now have a face. It would be nearly impossible to find a person in the western world who has not been photographed at least once. Does this overwhelming sea of faces intensify our own feelings of anonymity or are we comforted by ‘safety in numbers’? Do the anonymous photographic portraits we see floating in boxes at the flea markets confront us with our own mortality? Or are we assured by our eventual place among them contributing to the nameless community of mankind?

There are only so many people we can cross paths with in a lifetime and fewer with whom we form a bond deserving of a photograph. Do we fully appreciate that it is these portraits, anonymous to everyone but us, which have true value? They cost next to nothing, but the role they play in our lives is phenomenal. They keep our personal history current, they pull on our heartstrings, they represent our identity while we are alive, and preserve an image of us after we are dead. As time passes our portraits become like empty seashells –once living creatures, now dead and forgotten; an anonymous image in silver left on mankind’s shoreline.

Edward Steichen, in his ‘Family of Man’ exhibition of 1955, knew how particular portraits could evoke a collective familial recognition. He designed his landmark exhibition to capture the imagination and the heart of the crowds flocking to see the show in much the same way that personal photographs evoke personal memories. His intent was to unite man by presenting the world of the portrait as the world of the family. By carefully selecting and arranging the portraits he was able to touch our humanitarian sensibilities and give us, the viewers, a sense of belonging to the world of man. Only briefly did he look upon man’s dark-side.

Portraits of The Infamous touch us with a titillating fear much the same way a carnival ride scares us with a brush with the possibility of death. When we view images such as Jack the Ripper’s last victim in her bloodied bed, or stare at the vacant eyes of Dr. Harold Shipman, the British doctor who “euthanised” hundreds of his patients, we are horrified and fascinated at the same time. What feelings are evoked when we see the face of Charles Manson, now in his 60’s, applying for parole, next to the photograph of Sharon Tate, his victim, stopped forever in her youth? How can a murderer be a victim as well? How was Hitler’s portrait-smith, Hoffman, able to produce such stylized photographs of a genocidal manic, and how do we respond to a portrait of Milosovich, proclaiming innocence while the bodies of thousands of Serbs are exhumed from mass graves. Does our morbid fascination with the psychopathic murderer reflect recognition of our own dark side? Do we recognize our own family in the face of the murderer, or do we identify only with the victim? What do we see when we gaze at the young faces of John Venables and Robert Thompson, the two ten-year-old boys who tortured and murdered two-year-old Jamie Bolger, and left him on a railroad track in 1993? What prevents us from being the murderer? or the victim?

Do images of The Famous reflect our longings for recognition and admiration? Do famous people seek to embrace immortality through their fame? Today, young people seem obsessed with fame as though it would rescue them from their own seemingly empty existence. Is this obsession a result of being afraid of anonymity? With the population of the world exploding our ‘ignoble’ anonymity increases exponentially. It is as though we scramble for a photograph to affirm our existence. We may be convinced that fame and recognition will somehow make us happy. Yet when we see a recent portrait of Michael Jackson, we know that fame does anything but affirm self-esteem. Who is not moved to pity by the photograph of Marilyn Monroe’s corpse taken at the morgue and particularly when contrasted with images of her at the height of her fame? What do the mug shots of Hugh Grant and Divine Brown hold for us? What of the portraits of the now dead Diana? The Perfect and the Posed? What price immortality? Can the loss of anonymity be too high a price to pay? And for what?

What longing does a portrait answer?