Looking at the Obamas: On The Presidential Portraits
disposition.substack.com
Portraits are a tricky subject. So much of what makes a portrait successful has to do with the interplay between viewer and subject. A portrait of someone you've never seen before can be easily judged on the merits of its composition alone, while any recognition at all of the subject immediately brings to bear upon the viewing the viewer's previous knowledge, which necessarily factors in to any judgement as to whether or not the portrait in question is any good. One needs no more evidence than the continued obsession with answering the question of who, biographically, the Mona Lisa was, to understand that a large part of the awe she inspires has to do with her anonymity. Because we don't know anything about her, we're free to project onto the lady pretty much whatever we'd like. Because we have only the one example from her catalog of facial expressions, presumably as extensive as the average person's, we're able to call her legendary gaze unreadable, intractable. If we knew her, we might know that it is simply the look she gives when she's tired, or when her children are bugging her, or when she wants to go to bed with her husband. That is, despite its reputation as being so, it's not really that her look her is unreadable, it's that we can't read it. Conversely, the more familiar we are with the subject--the more exposure we have to the subject, especially when that exposure is not quite to the subject itself but rather to the subject
Looking at the Obamas: On The Presidential Portraits
Looking at the Obamas: On The Presidential…
Looking at the Obamas: On The Presidential Portraits
Portraits are a tricky subject. So much of what makes a portrait successful has to do with the interplay between viewer and subject. A portrait of someone you've never seen before can be easily judged on the merits of its composition alone, while any recognition at all of the subject immediately brings to bear upon the viewing the viewer's previous knowledge, which necessarily factors in to any judgement as to whether or not the portrait in question is any good. One needs no more evidence than the continued obsession with answering the question of who, biographically, the Mona Lisa was, to understand that a large part of the awe she inspires has to do with her anonymity. Because we don't know anything about her, we're free to project onto the lady pretty much whatever we'd like. Because we have only the one example from her catalog of facial expressions, presumably as extensive as the average person's, we're able to call her legendary gaze unreadable, intractable. If we knew her, we might know that it is simply the look she gives when she's tired, or when her children are bugging her, or when she wants to go to bed with her husband. That is, despite its reputation as being so, it's not really that her look her is unreadable, it's that we can't read it. Conversely, the more familiar we are with the subject--the more exposure we have to the subject, especially when that exposure is not quite to the subject itself but rather to the subject