Portraits; more responsibility

An art portrait can easily be unfair. This is a judgment we might be in a position to make if we know something about the sitter. Richard Avedon’s portraits are a good example. Though they can be devastating—as in the case of his shot of Marilyn Monroe—more often they strike me as mere editorializing, like David Levine drawings in silver halide. Did Avedon capture something important about Ezra Pound when he caught him with his eyes closed? A snapshot portrait can’t be unfair that way. First, snapshots in general aren’t unfair, as I am using the word. As a rule the snapshooters didn’t have an audience. They didn’t care about us, of course: they didn’t know about us and couldn’t have been taking pictures with us in mind. But beyond that, they didn’t really care about anyone other than the subjects—except possibly insofar as they may have vaguely thought they were creating a record for future generations, or for themselves a few years down the line—and they could hardly have been making an attempt to persuade, in any sense. So we can safely take snapshots at face value, whereas art photos are made by people whose motivation, intended audience, and basic drive to be fair we should be thinking skeptically about. But the more important reason a snapshot portrait can’t be unfair is that I, the finder and displayer, can’t be unfair to the subject. I don’t know this man. So I simply can’t tell if his tragic expression is meaningful, if the fez on his head is a joke, if the picture behind him has anything to do with anything. I can’t compare the impression he makes, through the picture, with the man himself. A little more generally, a photographer who professes to represent reality for an audience is a person with certain responsibilities. I can’t see how that applies to what a snapshooter does with a snapshot, but how about what I do with one? Though I am certainly more like an art photographer than I am like a snapshooter, I don’t twist the facts the way an art photographer might, because I don’t deal with them directly at all. True enough, in a sense every snapshot in my collection is an irresponsibility, since I don’t really care what they originally meant to people: I am ignoring reality in that respect. But I might be somewhat less irresponsible than Duchamp was when he displayed the work of contemporary industrial designers under his own name. In the case of a snapshot the rupture is more complete, because it involves not just a “repurposing,” but actual historical loss. So although I am very much turning the picture to my own purpose, I am willfully ignoring less when I do so.

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