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Portraiture

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Portraiture
Portraiture.
Describe the four key elements that are central to portraiture as outlined in Chapter 4, David Bate, Photography.

Face – personal appearance
Pose – manner and attitude, ‘upbringing’
Clothing – social class, sex, cultural values and fashion
Location – social scene of the person in the picture

Each element affects another in the overall potential for meaning. Passport photographs, for example, usually have plain or simple backgrounds, which serve to foreground the face of the sitter. The picture removes potential social connotations, i.e. any social-geographical-personal context about the sitter. In effect, the use of the four elements and their combined relation in the picture are what organises the rhetoric of a portrait.

The Face.
The expression on a face in portraiture is crucial and can exert a considerable impact on how a portrait signifies meaning. An expression can have a dramatic impact, even with the slightest movement of the eyes or mouth. The mouth is read as smiling, sad, angry, gaping, pout, etc. Eyes can seem ‘alive, ‘glaring’, ‘seductive’, etc. The dress of hair could be a whole chapter in itself. We ‘read’ these components of the head and the face for mood, temperament and character in relation the ethnicity, sex and age, and for their ‘attitude’, including attitude towards the viewer. We can also understand something of the value of the face in photography by considering the close-up in cinema.
Facial expressions signify a repertoire of ‘states’, indicating the potential mood of a person wearing them: anger, sadness, frustration, melancholy, etc. These conventions are articulated across different representational systems, like art, theatre, television, cinema and photography. The ‘face’ as a close-up shot in such practices thus serves several functions: it puts the viewer into an intimate position with the person seen; it shows the commodity and offers a point of psychological identification; and it gives things a

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    SHELDON
NODELMAN
 from
 E.
D’Ambra,
ed.,
Roman
Art
in
Context.
NY:
Prentice
Hall.
1993
pp.
10‐20
 Like all works of art. the portrait is a system of signs; it is often an ideogram of “public’ meanings condensed into the image of a human face. Roman portrait sculpture from the Republic through the late Empire-the second century BCE. to the sixth CE -constitutes what is surely the most remarkable body of portrait art ever created. Its shifting montage of abstractions from human appearance and character forms a language in which the history of a whole society can be read. Beginning in the first century B.C., Roman artists invented a new kind of portraiture, as unlike that of the great tradition of Greek Hellenistic art (whence the Romans had ultimately derived the idea of portraiture itself and a highly developed vocabulary of formal devices for its realization) as it was unlike that of their own previous Italo-Hellenistic local tradition. This new conception, conferring upon the portrait an unprecedented capacity to articulate and project the interior processes of human experience, made possible the achievement in the ensuing six centuries of what is surely the most extraordinary body of portrait art ever created, and forms the indispensable basis for the whole of the later European portrait tradition, from its rebirth in the 13th and 14th centuries to its virtual extinction in the 20th. No clear account of the nature of this reformulation of the structure of representation or of its historical significance has so far been given. That the portraiture which it engendered is strikingly “realistic” in the sense of evoking the presence of an astonishingly concrete and specific individuality, to a degree previously unknown and rarely equaled since, has been the universal experience of every observer. But this question-begging term (first used to characterize Roman portraiture, in opposition to the “idealism” imputed to the Greeks, three…

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