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For all the articles in Time magazine, the essays in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, the record prices brought at auction and the record crowds attending museum exhibitions, photography confounds us still.

On the one hand is the medium’s sophisticated technological basis: a labyrinth of f/stops, contrast grades, characteristic curves, and gamma for some, pure magic for others. On the other hand we have the myth of “photography-as-art,” a notion only valid within a revised and much-expanded definition of art, though a convenient sales tool for those who think they see an opportunity for quick profit and high return.

The common confusions about photography (at least, the kind of photography made for public display) are often posed as questions which, though answerable, seem to get us no closer to an understanding of the basic issues of photographic practice and meaning. Though they take many forms and vary widely in details, such questions can often be distilled to: How was the photograph made? (“Look at that detail!” “What camera do you use?” “A powerful composition of lines and tone.”) Or: How was the value of the photograph determined? (“Why is such an apparently ordinary photograph displayed here?” “Four hundred dollars for a photograph?”)

Understanding photographs will remain an almost impossible goal for as long as we continue to ask the wrong questions. Photography equipment advertising pervades the mass media, prompting a fixation on technology. The museumization of photography has too often taken the form of a reductive, point-for-point transposition of (formalist) painting ideas to photographs made with many different motives and a wide variety of purposes. In this exhibition we have attempted an experiment in curatorship based upon what pictures mean, rather than what they look like. The viewer is invited to look at these photographs “not as pictures of,” in Robert Heinecken’s words, “but as pictures about.”

Narrative and Context

In one sense, much of what we see in photographs is entirely gratuitous. A photographer cannot control the placement and inclusion of every blade of grass, each crack in the wall, every nuance of gesture. There may be an obvious point of interest—say, a figure standing before a landmark-but how can we know that everything else within the edge of the picture was included by someone who wanted the picture to look exactly as it does? If a boulder seems ready to fall on a car in the corner of the photograph, and the landmark is a waterfall which appears to charge toward the figure’s right ear, can we deduce that the picture is a statement about nature’s revenge on modern man? Surely not, if the picture is a snapshot in someone’s pile of disparate photographs, where the only common strain is figures before landmarks. But probably so, if the other pictures in the pile suggest some of the same feelings about nature’s ultimate triumph.

With the realization that context must play so important a role in the interpretation of photographs has come recognition of photography’s close relationship to literature, film, and video. Just as an otherwise obscure sentence or movie frame becomes specifically meaningful by its position in a novel or film, a photograph acquires specificity when considered with reference to a larger whole. For this reason, the book and the “photo-essay” remain important forums for the presentation of photographs. But the number of photographers has grown faster than their traditional outlets, and current fashion requires that photographs with a public purpose be designed for display on gallery walls. A logical outgrowth has been an attempt by many photographers to preserve the contextual identity of their work, by publishing thematic portfolios, insisting on exhibition of groupings of their photographs (as opposed to the single-image, “artwork” approach), designing installations which must be seen as a unified “piece,” self-publishing books and broadsides which may not have a commercial market, mounting and printing photographs together as single units, and other such strategies.

“The Portrait Extended” examines the use of some of these strategies in the construction of visual biography. This essay, though, must first discuss some of the antecedents of this new work: the classic, serial approach to extended portraiture, as represented by the family photo album and by the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, Richard Avedon, and Emmet Gowin.

The work shown in this exhibition is based on different approaches to similar concerns. The eight photographers included share with the family album photographer a desire to fully describe another individual-usually someone very close. But biography is a narrative activity, as much as it is a descriptive one. Faced with prevailing attitudes which emphasize the painting-world concept of an artwork as an isolated, integrated pictorial statement, these young contemporary photographers have felt a need to re-introduce (or re-emphasize) narrative context in a medium which has narrative at its root.

The Portrait Extended—Serial Portraiture

Photography and portraiture go back together a long way—to the earliest days of the process itself. Though photography’s inventors had scientific, technical, and artistic uses in mind for the medium, the public imagination was first stirred by the possibility of owning the likeness of oneself or another person. That fascination is still with us: surely no other category of photographic subject demands more film and paper than the records we make of each other’s faces.

And yet, there’s something unsatisfying in a single picture of someone we love. It never really looks like him or her, and never conveys the important information. (“He’s a doctor in San Francisco. He’s in love with a nice girl and he hopes to marry her.” “They left town about a year ago, and I hear she got a good job but he’s still looking. It’s awfully hard on them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended in divorce. Too bad about the kids, though.”) The possibility of a “total” or “extended” portrait—a “complete image” of an individual formed by combining a whole range of documents of their aspect and personality—has occupied many photographers throughout the short history of the medium. The amateur, of course, has most often and most extensively explored this theme (though perhaps unsystematically, or even unconsciously), and the volumes upon volumes of snapshot albums centered around a single person or a small group-often supplemented by captions and other written documents—attest to a desire in all of us to gain insight into other human beings by picturing them.

Alfred Stieglitz assembled what was probably the first selfconsciously “artistic” extended portrait, in his famous series of photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. He titled this complete series of over 500 photographs, A Portrait. He felt, we’re told, that a true portrait would record the entire life and death of the subject, and then continue with his or her child. Though the O’Keeffe portrait fell far short of his impossible ideal, the work stands as one of photography’s most lovingly persistent attempts to comprehend the significance of another human being in the artist’s life.

A Portrait covers a range of Stieglitz’s responses to a woman of extremely diverse moods and aspects. Many of the pictures are blatantly erotic-near-abstract idealizations of the powerful sexual attraction this young lover must have held for a man in his mid-50s. But the series als6 consists of snapshots of O’Keeffe, and large, carefully made platinum prints of her clowning for the camera. Her hands, beautiful in their shape and proportions as well as emblematic of her skill as a painter, appear again and again, both within the full-face portraits and in close-up sexual metaphors of stroking and grasping. In some prints, she glowers from the dark surface of the photograph, suggesting a threat she finally carried out when she left him to live in the desert and paint.

Stieglitz was part of the vanguard of photographers who felt their mission was to bring the medium out of its nineteenth century function as pure record of fact. To do this, he relied on form as a quasi-mystical symbolism for what he hoped were universal emotions and ideas. Yet his personal life, loves, and thoughts about the world remained an important component of the pictures he made. When Harry Callahan began working in the 1940s, the desire to avoid the exclusive identification of a photograph with its nominal subject was especially strong for many photographers. By the time he came to Chicago to teach at the Institute of Design (IIT) in 1946, his work fit well into the doctrine of cool formalism typically fostered by that institution. Yet, amid all the pictures which gain their impact from their transformation of the world into an obvious photographic abstraction, one finds the portraits of Eleanor.

Throughout most of his career, Callahan has photographed his wife, often standing in a tin-soldier snapshot pose—recalling those photo tips for amateurs that advise us to always include a human figure for scale—providing a human center for an exercise in graphic transcription of the environment. Sometimes Eleanor becomes a somewhat more specific metaphor-perhaps a spotlighted island of comfort and stability, softly glowing at the center of a dark room.

In 1958, Callahan made a series of photographs while on sabbatical in France which combine, by double exposure, the image of a nude female torso with natural elements (a tree, a bush, etc.). Only the title bf these pictures indicates that the body is Eleanor’s, but in the context of Callahan’s extended portrait of his wife as an archetypal source of life and comfort, no series of photographs could be a more appropriate summation.

Callahan’s portrait of Eleanor seems to have grown in a less directed and conscientious way than did the Stieglitz portrait of O’Keeffe-perhaps more in the way that a collection of snapshots is built by the vernacular photographer. Stieglitz “catalogued” O’Keeffe, in a sense-one can imagine him asking Georgia to sit “just once more,” so that some inconsistency in his grand enterprise could be remedied. Richard Avedon’s short serial portrait of his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, is even more deliberately constructed.

Callahan and Stieglitz—and some of the other photographers who work with the extended portrait idea—seek to describe their subjects in such a way as to leave much to the viewer’s interpretation. Avedon chose to be specific. There are no additional levels on which to consider these seven pictures of the photographer’s dying father, other than as his personal response to this specific death and to painful death in general. Another artist might have used the serial portrait as a tool to explain some of the subtleties of the event or of his or her response. Avedon hammers together, picture by picture, a foundation of tension for the final, horrid image of an emaciated old man.

Emmet Gowin, though closer in age to the photographers in this exhibition (he was born in 1941), works in a classic style related to the styles of Callahan and Stieglitz. The formal strictness of their work, though, and especially their penchant for abstraction and idealization, are not so apparent in Gowin’s work. Gowin’s photographs of his wife, Edith, give us the feeling that we know her, in each of her various attitudes. In this sense, they are like the Stieglitz portrait. But Gowin’s brand of contemporary romanticism is informed by photography’s rediscovery of its ability to convince through verisimilitude. It is thoroughly modern in its idea that the larger-than-life symbol of Woman or Mother is a falsehood from the start. Edith comes off, not as a marble rendition of the Moods of Woman, but as a living presence at the series of epiphanies which, for Gowin, is everyday life.

The Portrait Extended—In Search of a Total Portraiture

Against this background of custom and tradition, all contemporary portraits must form their own attempt to understand and communicate. The Extended Portrait is no art movement or school. On the contrary, it is the rare camera owner who hasn’t, at one time or another, made a series of photographs of some familiar face or body. But, as in all the arts, the recent history of photography has been one of attention to form and to the manner of construction and presentation of pictures, often at the expense of a proper examination of meaning and content. As a result, modern photographers have tended to avoid the overtly personal, sentimental, or connotative, and career photographers who make forays into such projects often do so only “for themselves” with no thought of including such pictures among those by which they prefer to have themselves known.

Today, as picture-makers in all media move back to content, photographers searching for alternatives to formalism see at least a hope of embrace by the establishment.