Portraits in painting and photography

Abstract

This article addresses the portrait as a philosophical form of art. Portraits seek to render the subjective objectively visible. In portraiture two fundamental aims come into conflict: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. In the first part of my paper, studying works by Rembrandt, I develop a typology of four different things that can be meant when speaking of an image's power to show a person: accuracy, testimony of presence, emotional characterization, or revelation of the essential ''air'' (to use Roland Barthes' term). In the second half of my paper this typology is applied to examples from painting and photography to explore how the two media might differ. I argue that, despite photography's alleged 'realism' and 'transparency,' it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture's two aims, the revelatory and the expressive. My paper will address the portrait, a genre that is surprisingly under-examined in aesthetics-especially in relation to its importance in art history. I find such neglect odd, because the more I think about portraiture, the more philosophical problems the genre seems to raise. Our discipline is still struggling with the notorious mind/body problem, something portraiture promises to resolve through its very nature: rendering the subjective objectively visible. Hence this would appear to be a thoroughly philosophical form of art.It has often been observed that portraiture has two fundamental aims that can conflict: a revelatory aim, requiring accuracy and faithfulness to the subject, and a

Depicting Movement

“…Even Nanay [forthcoming], who seems to think that what we see in a picture is something temporally nonextended, aims to explain how the picture, by giving rise to temporal mental imagery, lets us have an experience of what comes before and after, hence of something durationlike. And the psychological explanations offered by Gombrich [1964] andLe Poidevin [2007: ch. 7] also focus on how our processing of the static picture can give rise to an experience of something that has duration.…”

Crime’s face: Imagining and representing kleptomania

“…In her article ‘Portraits in painting and photography’, the philosopher Cynthia Freeland (2007: 95) has argued that the portrait is ‘a genre that is surprisingly under-examined in aesthetics—especially in relation to its importance in art history’. This is surprising given that painted portraiture has been known ever since the 17th-century, when members of various social classes had portraits made of themselves.…”

Exploring Tangible Interactions for Capturing Self Photographs

“…While clicking self-photographs the corporeality of experience is often claimed to be lost in visual theory . [6] …”