Portrait Photography Analysis: A Contemporary Portal to Artistic Truth by Alan Oakes
Portrait photography: A contemporary portal to artistic truth.
By Alan Oakes
Self Portrait, Annie Leibovitz
You don’t have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger and more revealing than truth through a portrait.
- Annie Leibovitz
Robert Alan Oakes
Art 480i Seminar
The search for visual truth is a continuing quest. A pondering of ontology pushes our efforts and abilities as a homogenous culture to question and challenge identity within the visual boundaries of technology and time. Building upon the visual codes and methods of the past, the relatively young medium of photography conveys the surrounding subjects in true aesthetic representation. We surround ourselves with images of the past wistfully longing for what some consider a better, more civilized time. Photographs-- especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the disintegrating past-- are inspirations to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by a photograph feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance or a longing to reactivate a past moment, feeling or experience. The lover’s photograph hidden in a married man’s wallet, the poster photograph of a pop star pinned up over an teenager’s bed, the coin in your pocket with the imprint of Lincoln’s face, the snapshots of a hairdresser’s child taped to their beauty mirror- all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact, transcend or lay claim to another reality. Portrait photography adheres to long existing functions, however new and instantaneous the medium may be. In order to understand photography, more specifically- portraiture, we must deconstruct the meaning and approach within the modern context. Just as any Fine Art, photography lives an intellectual and visual existence-
By Alan Oakes
Self Portrait, Annie Leibovitz
You don’t have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger and more revealing than truth through a portrait.
- Annie Leibovitz
Robert Alan Oakes
Art 480i Seminar
The search for visual truth is a continuing quest. A pondering of ontology pushes our efforts and abilities as a homogenous culture to question and challenge identity within the visual boundaries of technology and time. Building upon the visual codes and methods of the past, the relatively young medium of photography conveys the surrounding subjects in true aesthetic representation. We surround ourselves with images of the past wistfully longing for what some consider a better, more civilized time. Photographs-- especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the disintegrating past-- are inspirations to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by a photograph feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance or a longing to reactivate a past moment, feeling or experience. The lover’s photograph hidden in a married man’s wallet, the poster photograph of a pop star pinned up over an teenager’s bed, the coin in your pocket with the imprint of Lincoln’s face, the snapshots of a hairdresser’s child taped to their beauty mirror- all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact, transcend or lay claim to another reality. Portrait photography adheres to long existing functions, however new and instantaneous the medium may be. In order to understand photography, more specifically- portraiture, we must deconstruct the meaning and approach within the modern context. Just as any Fine Art, photography lives an intellectual and visual existence-