About Face

When is a portrait more then a portrait? In About Face, the current exhibition at Pier 24, photographs gathered in single-artist galleries or niches effectively present a more dynamic utilization of the portrait genre. Whether making what is artificial more real, preserving the living as lifeless, or picturing key figures, the photographers’ processes and unique decision making offers a portrait of the artist.

Hirsoshi Sugimoto’s Henry VIII series (1999) is a study in deception: borrowed light, borrowed form, and borrowed narrative. Sugimoto’s subjects are taken from London’s Madame Tussaud Wax Museum. The creators of Henry VIII’s waxen likeness intricately replicated Hans Holbein the Younger’s portraits of the infamous king and his wives. Sugimoto’s photos commemorate the transition from two dimensions to three dimensions to two again. The outcome is confounding, eerily triggering the portrait’s painting origins by preserving fictionalized expressions and subtle errors of proportion while also being true to its subject. 

Richard Learoyd deploys a technically impressive lensed camera obscura to capture his models in part precise detail and part blur from the real depiction of depth. In contrast to Sugimoto, Learoyd’s portraits propel overly authentic figures into artifice; men and women take on characteristics of overripe fruit or blanched vegetables, their humanness leached out in gray location-less settings. His photos are more still life then portrait.

About Face reassesses Richard Avedon, a specialist in slick and enticing portraits, as an artist with a flare for political acumen as evidenced in his Rolling Stones’s photo essay, The Family (1976). A grid of individual eight-by-ten-inch expressive portraits fill three walls of the gallery to become a vista into that year’s presidential election and a reference point for

Richard Avedon. The Family, 1976; sixty-nine photographs; each 8 x10 in. Courtesy of The Richard Avedon Foundation, New York.

politics in America in 2012. It is hard not to wonder who Avedon would choose if he were to complete this project of photographing sixty-nine key figures today, and how history would perceive these figures down the line. Avedon handily depicts the layers of fame, obscurity, posturing, and hindsight that live in portraits of a time.

Deeper into the catacomb of galleries, Mike Mandel’s Baseball Photographer Trading Cards (1975) captures photographers themselves posing as ballplayers. With humor and kitsch, Mandel manages to pin down an important moment in cultural production, and in what was then the newly prominent field of photography. Trading Cards comments on the economy of fine art photography while offering welcome levity in Pier 24’s temple to all things photographic.

About Face proposes the need for a portrait show titled Face Off, where representation and authorship meet on equal ground.

About Face is on view at Pier 24 Photography, in San Francisco, through February 28, 2013.

Emma Spertus is an Oakland-based artist. She received MFA from Hunter College in New York, NY. She is co-manager of Real Time and Space, an art studio and residency program in Oakland's Chinatown.