The Portrait's Subject


Book Description

"Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. ... images of human surfaces became understood as expressions of human depth during this era. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and in-depth archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Considering painting, photography, illustration, and other visual forms alongside literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing, Blackwood argues that portraiture was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology"--




The Portrait's Subject


Book Description

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject, Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during this era in paintings, photographs, and illustrations, as well as in literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Portraiture, the book argues, was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology. The Portrait's Subject reveals the underappreciated connections between portraiture's representations of the material human body and developing modern ideas about the human mind. It encouraged figures like Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Eakins, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James to reimagine how we might see inner life, offering a rich array of metaphors and aesthetic approaches that helped reconfigure the relationship between body and mind, exterior and interior. In the end, Blackwood shows how nineteenth-century psychological discourse developed as much through aesthetic fabulation as through scientific experimentation.




Portraits of Imaginary People


Book Description

Portraits of Imaginary People highlights a series of portraits produced by artist Mike Tyka utilizing a generative adversarial network (GAN).




Portraits of the Insane


Book Description

In the early 1820s, in the gloomy aftermath of the 1789 Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the French Romantic painter Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) made five portraits of patients in an asylum or clinic. No depictions of madness before or since can compare with them for humanity, straightforwardness and immediacy. The portraits challenge us to find responses in ourselves to the face and the embodied mysteries of the other person, and to our own internal (unsconscious, disavowed) otherness: in this sense, Gericault was a "painter-analyst". The challenge could not be more urgent, in our world of suspicion of the stranger, and of the medicalisation of madness. The book sketches the history of this last process, from the Enlightenment through to the Revolution and its public health policies, to the birth of the asylum in its interface with the penal system. But there was also a new medico-philosophical conviction that the mad were never wholly mad, and their suffering and disturbance might best be addressed through relationship and speech.




Portraits of Resistance


Book Description

A highly original history of American portraiture that places the experiences of enslaved people at its center This timely and eloquent book tells a new history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the origins of portrait painting in the United States, Jennifer Van Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African descent and obscured the portrait's importance as a site of resistance. Moving from the wharves of colonial Rhode Island to antebellum Louisiana plantations to South Carolina townhouses during the Civil War, the book illuminates how enslaved people's relationships with portraits also shaped the trajectory of African American art post-emancipation. Van Horn asserts that Black creativity, subjecthood, viewership, and iconoclasm constituted instances of everyday rebellion against systemic oppression. Portraits of Resistance is not only a significant intervention in the fields of American art and history but also an important contribution to the reexamination of racial constructs on which American culture was built.




The Art of Portrait Photography


Book Description

A collection of over 60 photographs by leading photographer Michael Grecco whose work regularly appears in Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and numerous other entertainment publications. Each shot is carefully analysed from concept to execution providing a valuable insight into his creative and technical methods.




Late Antique Portraits and Early Christian Icons


Book Description

This book focuses on the earliest surviving Christian icons, dated to the sixth and seventh centuries, which bear many resemblances to three other well-established genres of ‘sacred portrait’ also produced during late antiquity, namely Roman imperial portraiture, Graeco-Egyptian funerary portraiture and panel paintings depicting non-Christian deities. Andrew Paterson addresses two fundamental questions about devotional portraiture – both Christian and non-Christian – in the late antique period. Firstly, how did artists visualise and construct these images of divine or sanctified figures? And secondly, how did their intended viewers look at, respond to, and even interact with these images? Paterson argues that a key factor of many of these portrait images is the emphasis given to the depicted gaze, which invites an intensified form of personal encounter with the portrait’s subject. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, theology, religion and classical studies.




Classic Outdoor Color Portraits


Book Description

“It’s your turn to make a photograph,” states the author on the cover of this detailed handbook destined to become a classic instruction manual on portrait photography. And she shows the reader how by going through the basics of this photographic artform step by step in easy-to-follow instructions that will appeal to all levels of experience. For beginners, a working knowledge of the camera is not even necessary; and for professionals there is more than enough to challenge them to exceed their own present excellence. It has taken the author years of working in the portrait profession to focus and collect her approach to color portraiture and she presents her ideas in a way that will inspire even those who are not photographers. The book is designed for any artist working in any medium. All they have to have is an interest in the human subject. The book covers such wide-ranging subjects as a perspective on the history of the medium, composition, lighting, posing techniques, the portraitist’s “eye,” hints at how to enrich one’s self as a result of exploring the art of portraiture, and much more. “Classic Outdoor Color Portraits” is a vital text for photography schools and workshops, continuing education classes, artist schools and workshops, colleges, amateurs, and professionals in all regions and settings. NANCY REILY is also the author of “My Wisdom That No One Wants,” “Georgia O’Keeffe, A Private Friendship, Part I, Walking the Sun Prairie Land”; Georgia O’Keeffe, A Private Friendship, Part II, Walking the Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch Land”; and “Joseph Imhof, Artist of the Pueblos” with Lucille Enix, all from Sunstone Press.




Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture


Book Description

This book offers a new approach to the history of Greek portraiture by focusing on portraits without names. Comprehensively illustrated, it brings together a wide range of evidence that has never before been studied as a group. Sheila Dillon considers the few original bronze and marble portrait statues preserved from the Classical and Hellenistic periods together with the large number of Greek portraits known only through Roman 'copies'. In focusing on a series of images that have previously been ignored, Dillon investigates the range of strategies and modes utilized in these portraits to construct their subject's identity. Her methods undermine two basic tenets of Greek portraiture: first, that is was only in the late Hellenistic period, under Roman influence, that Greek portraits exhibited a wide range of styles, including descriptive realism; and second, that in most cases, one can easily tell a subject's public role - that is, whether he is a philosopher of an orator - from the visual traits used in this portrait. The sculptures studied here instead show that the proliferation of portrait styles takes place much earlier, in the late Classical period; and that the identity encoded in these portraits is much more complex and layered than has previously been realized. Despite the fact that these portraits lack the one feature most prized by scholars of ancient portraiture - a name - they are evidence of utmost importance for the history of Greek portraiture.




The Subject in Art


Book Description

Argues that the modern subject did not emerge from psychoanalysis or existential philosophy but rather within early-twentieth-century Viennese portraiture.