That Face! the Uncanny Art of Studio Photography’s Heyday
That Face! the Uncanny Art of Studio Photography’s Heyday « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
No product of human industry is infinite, but photography comes close. In 1976, John Szarkowski, the longtime curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, announced, somewhat gnomically, that “the world now contains more photographs than bricks.” As a metaphor of plenitude, Szarkowski’s phrase is wonderfully material, suggesting that photographs are just another object in the world, at once essential and interchangeable. As an estimate of quantity though, it now seems impossibly low. If digital photographs count (as by now they must), then the real figure must be several orders of magnitude larger, closer to the number of stars in the galaxy or neurons in the brain. And if I had to guess, I would expect that the majority of these photographs are of faces.
For a long time, photo portraits were restricted to a few places: in wallets, on ID cards and passports, in police files and high school yearbooks, on walls and desktops, on tombstones and wanted posters. Now they’re everywhere: on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr dashboards, they follow us around in a constantly updating cloud. Photography has become a means of autobiography and a broadcast art. It’s a way of keeping track what we wore last year and telling the world what we did last night. But as portraiture has become ubiquitous, it hasn’t gained in power. The ability to pierce or possess the viewer is still given to only a few images out of the billions.
Before Facebook, there was the photo studio: a room, a camera, and a photographer. Once upon a time, studio portraiture was an essential part of the visual vernacular. Like most vernaculars, studio photography was at once ubiquitous and invisible. Along with mug shots, crime scene photographs, aerial surveys and family snapshots, it belonged to the teeming undergrowth of photography, the network of practices and forms that sometimes predate and often anticipate its emergence as a recognized art form. In the hands of its greatest practitioners, it’s without question an art in its own right. But great portraits can also be the result of bureaucratic procedure, automatic gesture, or blind luck.