Portraits in Focus

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 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 03:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Irish Arts Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Irish Arts Review(2002-).

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.199 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 03:59:09 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iar

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493410?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


t?4?

??4 1 ? r

*KV

4

I

9

/

4 .?



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



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



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

4~~~~~* 1 . ~~~ ~ I



Documents

Portraits in Focus