About Face: Artists' Portraits in Photography
SPECIAL EXHIBITION OF PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY TO OPEN AT FOGG

Release July 16, 1997

The special exhibition About Face: Artists' Portraits in Photography will be on view at the Fogg Art Museum from July 19 through October 12, 1997. Drawn from the Harvard University Art Museums' collections, this exhibition explores the portrait genre in photographs which range from examples of the early commercial portrait trade of the 1850s to unique works of contemporary conceptual art. By no means a comprehensive study, this exhibition of over fifty works, as its title suggests, reflects on some aspects of the shifting topography and typology of the portrait in photography. Among the artists whose work will be featured are Mathew Brady, Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, George Platt Lynes, Dora Maar, Aaron Siskind, Lee Friedlander, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Beuys, Kiki Smith, Tina Barney, Nick Waplington, Yasumasa Morimura, Nicholas Nixon, and Gary Schneider. About Face is organized by Deborah Martin Kao, Charles C. Cunningham Sr., Associate Curator of Photographs.

This installation also celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the first major exhibition of photographs at the Fogg Art Museum. Organized in 1967, this early exhibition presented a survey of the history of portrait photography, and introduced the significance and diversity of photography's creative expression, emphasizing what the curators saw as the artist's share in "creating the personality represented, while at the same time showing what photography has brought to the tradition [of portraiture] and how it has expanded its meaning." The current exhibition testifies to the continued centrality of the portrait-photograph in contemporary art.

About Face presents imagery which evinces the diverse examples of portraiture in photography through which concepts of aesthetics, identity, and culture are constructed and/or subverted. The act of making portraits in photography requires an intricate collaboration between the photographer and the subject. This complex relationship tends to be exaggerated in artists' portraits where the discrete artistic visions of the maker and the sitter might alternately coalesce and vie for prominence, and the conventions of the portrait genre are often amplified, satirized, inverted, or re-invented.

Imperial photographs such as Mathew Brady's William Page (painter c. 1860) and Thomas Ustick Walter (architect of the Capital, c. 1860) are examples of portrait-photographs employed as carefully constructed status symbols that projected an atmosphere of learned and refined culture. Brady sought to ennoble portrait photography as a means to promote civic virtue and unified national identity. Posed with attitudes and with props which carefully invoke the sitter's occupation and social standing, Brady's portraits reinforced traditional boundaries of class, race and gender in American society.

A whimsical self-portrait produced by Nadar in 1865 which served as his carte-de-visite, or photographic calling card, portrays the artist, writer, caricaturist, and populist as if he were surveying Paris from his famous hot-air balloon named "The Giant." The portrait was staged in his studio. Legendary throughout Europe and America, The Giant measured a record-breaking forty-five meters in circumference, and became an emblem of the photographer's ambition in Honoré Daumier's well-known caricature "Nadar Raises Photography to the Height of Art," published in 1862.

Edward Steichen's portrait of Alfred Stieglitz (c. 1909) is an example of the modernist aesthetic known as "straight photography." The movement away from the soft-focused, hand-worked style of pictoralism was led by Alfred Stieglitz, co-founder, along with Steichen, of the New York Photo-Secession. The stylistic shift is evident in the ingenious portrait in which Steichen pays tribute to his compatriot, presenting Stieglitz as the confident icon of modernism. Steichen purposely engages the most difficult shooting conditions which serve to imbue the image with metaphors of light and vision. The portrait thus becomes a meditation on the nature of photography itself, a highly appropriate emblem for Stieglitz and Steichen, two of the most influential proponents and practitioners of the art in America.

Aaron Siskind's symbolic self-portrait, Martha's Vineyard II (1944), is a seaweed study which frames and orients the found object such that it reads as the letter "A," an allusion to the artist's first name. The self-portrait manifests concepts that are central to Siskind's philosophythe dichotomy of the organic and the geometric in both natural form and in man-made design, and the creation of objects and new viewpoints mediated through the maker's personal vision.

Kiki Smith's photoetching Free Fall (1994) is an evocative self-portrait that requires the viewer to unfold Smith's image from the book's binding and handle its vulnerable, fleshy paper. When opened, a falling figure cascades forth as the paper envelopes the viewer with its proportions. Yet Smith's form is indistinct and de-eroticized, composed of a blurry array of irregular black and white speckles resembling those in a repeatedly enlarged printing matrix. Simultaneously adopting and subverting the intimacy of the book format, Smith balances the viewer's possession of her object/body through the size of the work and the unsettling anonymity of her figure.

Yasumasa Morimura explores gender and culture ambiguity in his self-portrait Ambiguous Beauty/Animai no bi (1995), which displays the artist printed on a cheap paper and wood fan. Costumed as Marilyn Monroe, Morimura presents himself as the archetypal Hollywood pin-up girl, yet the image takes the form of a Japanese bijin-ga -- a traditional beauty often used to decorate fans and other items of popular culture. In molding his own Japanese body into the icon of the American female beauty, the artist proves himself capable of shuttling back and forth between East Asian and Western culture, using self-portraiture as a means of cultural critique.

In producing About Face, Deborah Martin Kao was assisted by four undergraduate students studying fine arts at Harvard University. "As a teaching institution, it is an essential part of our mission to educate students in the history of art and art criticism through engaging them in the work of the museum," states Kao in her introduction to the exhibition. "Without them, not only would productivity significantly decline, but the vigorous intellectual life that they bring to our departments would be greatly missed. Four exceptional students, Chelsea Foxwell '99, Paul Galvez '97, Nancy Lainer '97, and Jenna Webster '97, have made remarkable contributions to the photograph department over the past three years. This exhibition constitutes the public face of their good works."

RELATED EVENTS

Gallery Talks
Free with the price of admission to the Art Museums. Admission is free on Saturday mornings.
Saturday, July 26, 11:30 a.m., with Deborah Martin Kao
Saturday, August 23, 11:30 a.m., with Jenna Webster, research assistant, Department of Photographs
Saturday, September 20, 11:30 a.m., with Deborah Martin Kao

Artist Panel
Wednesday, October 8, 6:00 p.m., $15 (Friends: $12 )
Fogg Art Museum; registration required, call (617) 495-4544; complimentary parking available at the Broadway Garage, on Felton Street between Cambridge Street and Broadway. A special evening featuring a panel of artists including Judith Black, Elsa Dorfman, Nicholas Nixon, and Gary Schneider, who will discuss the extraordinary breadth and meaning of self-portraiture in contemporary photography. The panel will be moderated by Deborah Martin Kao.

Series
"Light Conversations": Seminars with Contemporary Photographers at the Fogg Art Museum
Mondays 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., lunch follows in the Naumburg Room at the Fogg.
Series: $60 for seminars, $100 with lunch (Friends: $45 for seminars, $75 with lunch)
Contemporary artists speak from and about their own work to an intimate audience in the Agnes Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, registration required, call (617) 495-4544.

September 20, with Abelardo Morell
October 20, with Barbara Norfleet
November 10, with David Levinthal