Art Review - February Issue - (Page 118)

Warning : session_start : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : session_start : Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 Books: Before photography’s arrival in the mid-nineteenth century, few people knew what they really looked like; mirrors were a luxury reserved for the upper classes. The democratisation of vanity that leads to the recent surge in plastic surgery begins, then, with the invention of the photographic portrait. William Ewing’s Face: The New Photographic Portrait is a manifesto against our current image culture and its unrealistic ideals of beauty, youth and celebrity. How, he asks, can we establish our own identity in the face of global homogenisation – the ‘grouplook’ a term the author coins after Orwell’s ‘groupthink’ ? Face is neatly arranged into chapters with evocative titles like ‘Mergers’, ‘Masks’ and ‘Making Faces’. Impassioned commentary and an anthology of quotes about photography over the ages accompany an impressively well researched selection of contemporary fine-art photography – some obvious Gillian Wearing, Cindy Sherman , most not – with some gruesome examples from medical photography and an astonishing NASA satellite picture, a surrealist trompe l’oeil image of a ‘human face’ on the surface of Mars, thrown into the eccentric mix. Militantly at odds with the twenty-firstcentury cult of self-awareness, Ewing is mistrustful of psychoanalytic analysis, and particularly cynical about photography’s ability to reveal hidden truths about the human soul. He supports Thomas Ruff’s view that portraiture has ‘all the authenticity of a pre-arranged reality’. Indeed, as Ewing points out, photography’s first principle of truth was already undermined by the rise of the professional retoucher in the nineteenth century, a time when most could only afford one or two portraits in their lifetimes, and expected them to be as flattering as possible. And yet Face is a deeply romantic book, as much an exercise in restoring portraiture’s former mystery as a political rant. The first two chapters sing with nostalgia for the early photographic studios and the mesmerised reactions of their first subjects. We learn that the first portrait was probably taken by a microscopist and that the resulting photographs were not only tiny but also full or three-quarter-length poses, to better show off the harmonious proportions of the body. Only when portraiture became more accessible, with barbers starting to throw in a photo with a shave, did photographic studios offer their bourgeois clients more expensive, larger format prints, focusing solely on the face. As Ewing slyly notes, the results were not always welcome: the enlarged formats not only magnified natural deformities, but, worse, the primitive plates of the camera turned freckles into black spots and made blond hair look dirty. For Ewing, the best new portrait photographers revel in that old magic of ‘making faces’, creating original looks or challenging boundaries such as gender or age through make-up and masks, photomontage, advanced retouching techniques or even simulations of genetic modification. With such a range of creative tools at hand, the adventurous photographer, then, must resist blandness and support the individual’s right to invent their own identity. And if they’re lucky in the future, Ewing excitedly predicts, photographers might just find their subjects provided ‘by an obliging spacecraft that happened to pass by the planet Mars’. Jennifer Thatcher ace: The New Photographic Portrait By William A. Ewing Thames & Hudson, £29.95 / $50.00 ARTREVIEW F p118-121 Books AR Feb07.indd 118 4/1/07 23:48:40  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

https://www.nxtbookmedia.com