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Irish Arts Review
Portraits in FocusAuthor(s): Stephanie McBrideSource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 25, No. 4 (Winter, 2008), pp. 80-83Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493410 .
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RHA 2008: PORTRAITS IN FOCUS f
AWA R D
Portraits in Focus Photography advances centre stage at this year's 178th Annual
RHA Exhibition, with the inaugural Bank of Scotland (Ireland)/
Irish Arts Review Portrait Prize awarded to Patrick Donald, writes
STEPHANIE MCBRIDE
aron Scharf's seminal work Art
and Photography (1968) noted
that with the arrival of photogra
phy, 'Quite optimistically, many /
artists held the view that it would 'keep its
place' and function primarily as a factotum to
art. But this was both presumptuous and futile.'
This ambivalence has constantly haunted
photography throughout its history, dogging its
status as an art form, despite its growing impor
tance in art practice. Perhaps this tension is
deeper than ever before, as the medium of
photography expands and accelerates and cre
ates a hypersaturated image soup within our
digital age, from family snaps to celebrity mugshots and the online 'galleries' of YouTube and Facebook.
At the same time, there are clear signs that the notion of the photographic portrait is growing in
assurance and acceptance in the art world and in national institutions. Currently running in the
Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC is Richard Avedon's Portraits of Power. By some accounts, photog
raphy's arrival in London's National Gallery was as recent as 2005 (with Tom Hunter's portrait of
Hackney, Living In Hell and Other Stories). Here in Ireland, Thomas Ruff's Photographs: 1979 to the
Present, as well as Willie Doherty's retrospective False Memory, both shown in IMMA in 2002, reflect
photography's move from the periphery. As an art form, it now has its own galleries and it has become
collectible, with Irish photographers' works held in prestigious collections.
Major awards for photography have been introduced such as the Curtain O'Donoghue Photography
Prize, in existence now for three years at the Royal Hibernian Academy. This year marks the arrival of another important award at the RHA, the (6,000 Bank of Scotland (Ireland) Photographic Portrait Prize in association with the Irish Arts Review. Applications for this first major photographic portrait prize in Ireland were made via the open selection section of the 178th RHA Annual Exhibition.
What expectations are generated by the photographic portrait today? Who are these portraits for? And what role do the very notions of 'likeness' and 'resemblance' - key
ideas within the portrait genre - play in today's Photoshopped world, in which images
can be manipulated beyond recognition, whether through the virtual world of software
or the physical transformation of the very substance of these images, whether by genetic
1 PATRICK DONALD
Fairground Scene
Cuba
2 JOHN KELLETT
Stairway
I WINTER 2008 IRISH ARTS REVIEW 81
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E RHA 2008: PORTRAITS IN FOCUS
AWA R D
engineering or cosmetic surgery? How are the ambiguities inherent in the genre articulated? How does ethnic or social identity func
tion in the construction of the portrait in contemporary practice?
Many of these questions aren't new. For example, look back
through the legacy of portraiture, and how the use of the painted
female portrait as a dating exercise in the 18th century foreshad
ows the lonely hearts video of the 20th century and the online
social networking avatars of the 21st. Any portrait, from the 'full
flattery' to the 'warts-and-all', always contains certain social
truths and half-truths about its own epoch. It tells stories about
the individual or the group subject of the portrait, and their cul
ture and status, and it tells stories too about the artist and the
audience of then and now.
Yet the notion of the decline of the portrait was the theme of
a 2004 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London,
ElS
3 JACKIE NICKERSON
Untitled I
4 PATRICK MCHUGH
Brendan
Photography and the Death of the Portrait. Its premise was the need
to move beyond perceived limitations of the photographic por trait as an authentic representation of the sitter, a concept that
can trace its origins back the Renaissance. Alongside conven tional portraiture were subversive challenges to the genre such as Nancy Burson's 1982 example of computer art, Warhead 1.
This combined world leaders' facial features based on the rela
tive size of their nuclear arsenals, offering a composite image of
Brezhnev's eyebrows, Reagan's jowls and Thatcher's lips. Other challenges include Cindy Sherman's deconstructive
self-portraits. From her Untitled Film Stills in the late 1970s, her
work continues to demolish those images of preferred femininity in a parade of masquerades, asserting a fluidity in identity and
questioning the politics of gender authenticity. Irish artist Trish Morrissey recreates scenes from an imagined family album, with
the invisible tensions behind the cliched images of 'happy fami
lies' as well as the role of the photo album in archive and mem
ory. Her Women with Moustaches pushes questions of image and
gender norms, the freakshow potential undercut by the carefully applied cosmetics and the composition's formality.
Other key works in modem Irish photography explore the
portrait genre's potential not only as representation but also in
addressing and reflecting the shifting underlying social contexts. David Farrell's Ash series of portraits are of unknown people,
yet somehow intimate and direct. Each sitter is shot against the
same indigo backdrop, giving more emphasis to the subject rather than the setting. This in turn invites us to look very
directly at the faces represented - different generations, all linked by the traces of the ash imprint following an Ash
Wednesday ceremony in a Catholic church. The portraits give a
sense of a tradition in flux or possibly in decline, of shared ritu
als that sometimes seem to be vanishing in the rhythms of a
newer Ireland. In another recasting of the photographic portrait, Karl Grimes's
hyper-real animal portraits in Future Nature and the visual opu
lence of his exhibition 'Dignified Kings' in Dublin's Natural History Museum, further attest to the richness of the genre's potential.
John Gerrard's use of digital media dynamically tests the
contours of the genre, further stretching the meanings of the
portrait. First shown in the Gallery of Photography in Dublin in
2003, his Portrait Diptych offered an interactive experience where spectators could change the facial expressions of the sub
jects, having them smile, frown or blink. Saddening Portrait har
nesses other possibilities of 3D media, where this portrait
saddens in appearance over a century, beginning on the open
ing night of the show. In another portrait in the series, the rela
tionship between the subject and viewer is partially inverted, as
the portrait's eyes follow the spectator around the gallery, con
fronting our own gaze.
Incorporating individual portraits as a visual commentary to
reveal a bigger picture on the changing face and faces of Ireland
is at the core of Mark Curran's Southem Cross (2002), consisting
of two sections. Site includes portraits of construction workers,
each named and located as in county of origin, photographed on
site, amid the soil excavation and earthworks which will shape
new topographies and geographies. In a companion piece,
Prospect, presents a series of images of office workers from the
IFSC's tall glass blocks - the shiny towers of babel, new lan
guages and power relations displacing older forms of labour.
While Andy Warhol celebrated the Polaroid as a medium for
portraiture, it is clear from the shortlist for the Bank of Scotland
(Ireland) Portrait Award that traditional documentary
approaches are still very much to the fore.
John Kellett's Stairway shows an overhead shot of a nun
ascending a staircase (Fig 2). The pleasing symmetry of the stair
well structure in the composition, with shafts of light and shadow,
means that there is little access to the woman's face itself: she takes on a more symbolic, iconic aspect - a nun in a traditional habit, an ordered way of life, a human figure in a still moment.
Peter McHugh's image of Brendan, shot at the Kildysart Agricultural Show, is part of a series depicting aspects of County
8 2 | IRISII ARTS REVIEW WINTER 2008
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Clare (Fig 4 ). This portrait suggests a familiarity and intimacy:
the lens allows the subject's personality to come through via gait
and gesture. There is a certain reticence before the gentle prob
ing of the camera, with hands more used to working than at rest
by his side, and a smile just below the surface.
Jackie Nickerson's Untitled 1 features a young girl, shot
against a neutral background (Fig 3). Unmoored from her
domestic context, this background focuses the viewer's atten
tion on the girl's face. Carefully composed, it has a direct
address, a sensitive rapport that allows small glimpses into her
personality - her unflinching gaze, a slight tension in the lips,
arms down by her side - posed yet poised. This image is from a
collection entitled Domicile, in which the artist indicates an
interest in the psychological as well as the physical influence of
locality. It's difficult to escape the texture and luminosity in the
subject: a swathe of freckles across her face and forehead
remind us of the historical predominance of pale, Celtic skin -
its vulnerablity to sunburn (her arms, showing traces of expo
sure) - while she is also firmly grounded in today's media cul
ture in her branded pink top, caught in a graceful and seemingly
effortless technique. The winner of the Bank of Scotland (Ireland) Photographic
Portrait Prize, Patrick Donald, indicates his approach to his
practice in his photographer's statement - 'the energy and
grace of movement... to stop in time as a photograph'. Donald's
work crosses many landscape genres in Ireland - city, rural and
seascape. While his urban portraits range from London and
Paris to Vienna, he also explores the cultural diversities of pas
toral and nomadic people in Mongolia and Nepal. He insists on
'patience, light and instinct being the three main elements for
successful pictures', in order to hunt out the decisive shot, the
elusive light. He also values photography's critical role in doc
umenting the lives of others in various bodies of work as, he
says, 'a means of posing questions.'
His winning image Fairground Scene, Cuba, is part of the Cuba
2008 Images of the People series exhibited earlier this year at
Monster Truck Gallery, Dublin. His black and white images are
hand printed using traditional darkroom techniques (Fig 1).
His focus is on people on the streets of Havana in their daily
encounters, in order to capture the changes 'in this last outpost
of Communism'. In classic documentary style, a girl and boy sit
astride their fairground horses. The girl looks directly at
Donald's camera, in the present tense as it were, while the boy's
gaze is decidedly elsewhere, 'elsewhen'. The conventional site of
fairground fun is here curiously undermined by the girl's sullen
scowl, the oblivious people in the background, and the hobby
horses' artificial, wooden, cartoonish and static gaiety, all in con trast to the boy's searching gaze towards something outside this
world and beyond the frame. With different modes of address in play, photography's power
and potential as a medium continues to exercise viewers, and these winning portraits find new ways to engage and invite us to reflect on how we see and are seen by others.-U STEPHANIE McBRIDE is the author of Ireland into Film: Felicia's Journey (2007).
Acknowledgements: Ruth Carroll, RHA; Tanya Kiang, Gallery of Photography, Dublin
Any portrait, from the 'full flattery' to the 'warts-and-all', always contains certain social truths and half-truths about its own epoch
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