PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY AS IDENTITY: A STUDY ON PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE CONCEPT OF IDENTITY

PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY AS IDENTITY: A STUDY ON PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE CONCEPT OF IDENTITY

Cemre Yesil Istanbul, 21.02.2011

Abstract: Human kind always had the need of defining, describing things that are around him/her and distinguishing these things from one another. This existential need of human kind gives birth to the notion of “identity” , which, since the beginning of civilization had been growing more and more into a very strong issue not only individually but also sociallly. To answer this need , he/she had started giving names to objects, to people, to places, to animals, simply to anything that exists.Even though we may never know if this solution was the first appearence of verbal language as a tool for communication in a community , it supposedly helped people to gather on the same level of understanding.

Nevertheless, language is not only verbal; human kind had created more than one language which are derived from human senses in terms of human's perception psychology . These different languages that are created by people; are some methods for beeing able to identify things communally for some practical and sentimental reasons.

For example; music is a language of hearing or audition; as the sense of sound perception which is generally composed for a sentimental reason , whereas a traffic sign is a product of a sight language for a practical reason. In the contemporary era, between all these languages, “ Visual Language” is the one that is increasingly beeing generated compared to others and because of its abundance, the mediums and the products of it creates a debute of identity. Any kind of visual material which is created by people, for people, has

at least one notion of "identity". This possible identifications have varierities in terms of what they serve for and what they identify. The medium that is used to create certain visual materials can distinguish the magnitute of the meaning of identity. The Photography, as a medium which increasingly became a tool of existance, has a huge role to identify, to be identified and to questionize identification in comtemporary world because it is always a commun assumption that photography has a deep relationship with “reality”. It is because of our illusion that “the eye” is trustworthy. In a world where it is difficult for us to “identify” what is “real”, it is quite wierd to think of “photography” as a phenomenon of reality. When you link photography with reality, it is inevitable to think about the use of photography as “identity”, but ofcourse it depends how and where it is used. This article's aim is to analyze the fields where portrait photography is used as a subject, as a tool or as an interface in terms of identity and to argue about how and where it is functionable or not, for an individual or for a society, in terms of sociology and philosophy. This study will base on a qualitative research around the ideas of “portrait photography as identity” and the relation between “portrait photography and identity.”

Keywords: Photography, Portraiture, Identity, Representaition, Manipulation, Reality

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"Many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction."

Sigmund Freud

INTRODUCTION TO “IDENTITY”

We all derive identity from the world around us. We define our inner and outer selves with the concrete notions that we feel close to. We also perceive other identities in the same way; with the world around them. We all have different identities because for every individual there are different things to be attached and different things that appeal to. With all the things that we are attached and appeal us, we create images of how we want to see ourselves and how we want to be seen. Human kind’s need of this overlap of “seeing”, is because of the need of the “proof” of our images can be reflected back to us through the desire of the others. For example, the things that we choose to wear is a very simple and physical pattern of how we want to see our selves and how we want to be seen, in our daily life. In our social environment, our “ego” is like an interface between our inner selves and out world. According to Sigmund Freud, the ego refers to your identity, or sense of self. It grows out of the id and can control the id, to an extent. The ego functions according to the reality principle because its job is to gratify the id in accord with reality. Because the ego is concerned both with reality and the id, it operates on all three levels of awareness (the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels of the psyche).1 1

Kuther,Tara. Freud's Theory of Personality: Development of the Psyche in Developmental

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Identity is central to Erik Erikson’s thinking. Erik Erikson discussed the development of negative identity. A negative identity, in Erikson’s point of view, was defining oneself by what he was not. I think, that theory of Erik Erikson, indicates that, there are things purport to show us something about what’s missing in our own lives and offer us some knowledge of what seems to be hidden from us. An adolescent may adopt a set of values as part of his or her identity, but they are not necessarily mature values, and may be changed. Early in life, a negative identity may emerge from having been shamed, punished, made to feel guilty. Adolescent may become suddenly aware of the need for a separate identity from others, different from parents' expectations. Even if one has solved an identity crisis, later changes can precipitate a renewal of the crisis. On teenagers, he said, "Young people in serious trouble are not fit for the couch. They want to face you and want you to face them." It's a mistake, he said, to treat young people in groups like gangs as people with only negative values. Rather we can see them as people who have gotten sidetracked in looking for the truth. 2 According to Erik Ericson, our identities can change. No identity is stable. So, how are we going to document a non-stable and a noneternal “identity”? Is portrait photography a tool for it? For how long does the truth of the “identity” stay with the photograph it self?

Photography serves for the term “identity” in many fields . Photography is used as a tool for identification and it is already an identical medium itself. So, it can be appropriate to define “photography” as a medium which contains different levels of identities depending on what the image is, what the image serves for ,where it is used.

There are even more dependencies about certain kinds of photography which I will Psychology, Connecticut, 2001.

2 Marcia, J. E., In Handbook of Adolescent Psychology , Identity in adolescence, New York, 1980.

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mention about later. The identical use of photography is in our daily life. We use photographs as a representation of our identities and the world around us. Actually today, we live in a world where it is almost like an obligation to define our selves with our photographs. The obligation of having our portrait photographs on our ID cards is a very simplistic example for this condition.

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“IDENTITY IN PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY”

The very first visual abilities of babies are distinguishing human face from the other visual elements, followuping it and having eye contact. These abilities subsequent to distinguishing the mother’s face from other faces eventhough in those times their vision is blurry. So, the very first visual identification that we do is about the human face and

the very first person that we visually identify is our mother. Many scientific

researches and controled experiments proof that the babies perceive the human face as an image which is not related with other senses of human body, they distinguish this image from any other visual elements and they give completely different reactions to human face. It is for sure that this is one of the instincts that babies have to be able to survive, but is it just for babies? Don’t we still have this instict as grownups? We all still have this instict. We all still have the irresistable instict of being interested in looking at human faces. The researches about human brain proof this statement. It is experimented that human brain perceive the human face as in one piece; not as a configuration of eyes,nose and mouth. This way of perception of the human brain, is the reason that we are able to identify and remember someone that we met many years ago.

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There is another proof of human perception about human faces is that all expressions of human face is deciphered universally. No social culture has an effect on any face expressions.The face muscles work identical in every culture. This statement is studied in Charles Darwin’s book called “The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals”, with the help of the photographs of the Swedish photographer Oscar G. 3

Çetin, Orhan Cem. Portrait Photography and Psychology, Unpublished Conference Text, Strasbourg Contemporary Arts Museum, Strasbourg, January 2010.

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Rejlander .4 There is a very strong relationship between this statement about facial expressions and the notion of “identity. According to this universal analysis about facial expressions, it is getting hard to distinguish people’s faces. This is the reason why the portrait photographs on govermental documents like, identity cards, passports, visas are like inexpressive. So, isn’t it ironic that the photographs of our faces without any expressions serve more about our identities compared to the photographs which have our faces with a strong expression which derives from our feelings? Don’t we define our identities trough our feelings? Doesn’t a portrait photography represent us more when it has a clue about how we feel? Insted it doesn’t work this way if portrait photography is used as a tool for security purposes. It doesn’t matter how you feel or how your real facial expression is when it comes to distinguish you from other people in a modern world. In modern world, your “biometric” is the definiton of your identity. “Biometric” is the science and the technology of measuring and statistically analyzing biological data. As it not possible to measure how happy or how sad you are, you become undefinable.

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Darwin,Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published by John Murray, London, 1827

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Figure 1 : From the book: “The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals”

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Charles Darwin, photographs by: Oscar G. Rejlander , 1827 Figure 2 : From the book: “The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals”, Charles Darwin, photographs by: Oscar G. Rejlander , 1827

Between 1981-1985, the famous photographer, Thomas Ruff made a series of these inexpressive portraits of people . In the publication about Thomas Ruff of Vancouver Art Gallery, his work was described like this: “ Along with his own thoughts on pictorial composition, he undertook concentrated study of the portrait genre to come up with a contemporary form of representation. He decided on a bust portrait and a mode of representation that would be as neutral as possible in order to foreground the sitters face while at the same time avoiding any psychological interpretation. Every sitter would be photographed like a plaster bust, based on Thomas Ruff's assumption that photography only shows the surface of things anyway.

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Figure 3: A selection from Thomas Ruff’s portraits, (1981-1985)

By 1981 he had already defined the specifications for his pictures: the sitters, wearing their ordinary clothes and seated on a stool, would be photographed with a serious, calm expression on their faces. There was to be no show of feeling, like smiling, grinning, or 'flirting' with the camera. He made an intuitive selection of the people around him as models for these portraits: peers, friends, and acquaintances from the academy or from the nightlife on 'Ratinger Straße' in Dusseldorf. This work of Thomas Ruff is a configuration of two fields of photography in terms of “identity”. He showed and criticized the “ identical use of photography” with using “the art form of photography”.

That encouraged me to take another photograph of the photographs of Thomas Ruff , which also shows a man question about Thomas Ruff’s work about

“identical

photography”, in a solo exhibition in The National Museum in Budapest .

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Figure 4: photograph by Cemre Yesil, The National Museum (Nemzeti MĂşzeum), Budapest,2009

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MANIPULATION, REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY

In the beginning of 1990’s;

the start of the digital era in photography, the

supposedly trustable relationship between photography and identity, even increasingly became more and more problematique. The computer and the digital cameras were involved in our daily life and the computer had the power to adjust and manipulate the “image”. When the digital image was an image of an actual person, the questions were popped up. Is it the real image of the subject? This was a great delusion and an injustice for the darkroom process of analog photography. Just because it was too much easier to adjust and manipulate the images on computer than in darkroom, people lost the trust they have for “the real representative feature” of photography which was actually never there. This delusion was caused by the deficient information about the analog photography process. In every house, there was a computer for different purposes, but there wasn’t a darkroom. Only the people who were involved with “creating photography”

had competence information about the analog process. Not only the

population that didn’t have enough information about analog photography had this delusion, also some governments had it. In 1993, The Turkish Secretary of Interior, made an explicit decleration, a communique that said “ It is forbidden to use any digital version of

portrait photographs, on any official document because of the ease of

manipulation and instability of digital image.” This decleration of The Turkish Secretary Interior was a great example for the general assumption that people have for digital image. Infact, their assumption was a prejudice about “digital image”

and a false

hypothesis about “chemical image”, because this assumption exposed the justice that

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says : “chemical image doesn’t lie, digital image lies”. With this false inference, the problematique of representing an identity of a person with inexpressive portraits even increases depending on the material that is used to create the image. So, what is left to represent a person in photography? Is manipulation a factor that makes an image impossible to represent ? Infact, taking a photograph is already a manipulation of reality.

Victor Burgin says “ Manipulation is of the essence of photography, photography would not exist without it. In photography, certain pysical materials are technically handled so that the meanings are produced. Photographers are people who manipulate the pyscial means of production of photography; cameras, film, lighting, objects, people. Using the productive capabilities of photography to repreduce the world as an object of aesthetic contemplation, and nothing else, is no less “manipulative” than is any other use of photography.” 5 Manipulation is not only possible for images or photographs. People manipulate them selves physically. So, if governments and society believe the force of representation of inexpressive portraits, it is possible to understand that these faces belong to same identity?

Figure 5: http://www.internethaber.com/news_detail.php?id=114047

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Burgin, Victor, Art, common sense and photography, The Camerawork Essays, edited by J.evans,pp:47-85, London, 1997

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If we go further about self manipulation, it is appropriate to talk about the French contemporary artist named Orlan. “Orlan is not her name. Her face is not her face. Soon her body will not be her body. Paradox is her content; subversion is her technique. Her features and limbs are endlessly photographed and reproduced; in France, she appears in mass- media magazines and on television talk shows. Each time she is seen she looks different, because her performances take place in the operating room and involve plastic surgery.�6 So, what about the value of representation for inexpressive portrait series of Orlan? With which facial appearance or inexpressive portrait photograph, we get the idea of real Orlan or the real representation of Orlan?

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Rose, Barbara. Art in America, 81:2 , pp. 83-125, http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Orlan/Orlan2.html, February 1993

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Figure 5: http://brewermultimedia.com/__oneclick_uploads/2009/06/orlan.gif

From an etymological point of view, it is possible to find another topics to argue about the relationship between the “identity” and “portrait photography”. For example, in Turkish language there is a special name given for these “identical” photographs. All the photographs that is attached to your identity card, passport or any other govermental document is called “vesikalık”. According to the etymological dictionary of the famous Turkish languist Sevan Nisanyan, the word “vesika” derives from Arabic language and the first meaning of the word is “the trustable”. 7 This need of giving a special name to this certain kind of photography, indicates human kind’s trust on an image of human kind’s face. This is a very strong example for the social acceptance of the identical value that the “image” (the photograph) has, infact it is just a representation of an origin.

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Nisanyan, Sevan, Turkish Etymology Dictionary, 2002 http://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=vesikalık

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Every representation has a presenter and a target perceiver. Does these inexpressive portraits that is used to represent us in our daily life, have a presenter and a target perceiver? Actually, they don’t. There is a physical product that supposedly represents someone, but there isn’t an actual representor with a certain personal “intension” and there isn’t also a person or a group of people to perceive the representation with someone’s intension. It is like a generally accepted code which serves for some utilities in common life. The photographer takes these photographs to make living; not to “represent” someone even if the photographs are meant to serve for it and the government perceives the photographs; not to analyze the representation but to distinguish someone from others with the appearance of faces. In this condition, this use of photography has no individual characteristics other than a shape of a nose or a color of a face; so, how come these photographs actually represent us? Isn’t it too superficial? In a perfect World, we wouldn’t define our identities “just” with our physical appearance. It is kind of a racist stance, because we look like our parents; so, our appearance derives from our ethnography. It is for sure that our ethnography not just affects our physical appearance; it also gives information about who we are. It is the same with an ugly big nose, for example. It effects who we are. So, we are who we look like from outside and we are what we “remember” from inside; (our personal history) and we are the illusions between them. This is our identity. That is to say, a representation of a human has to have both of these notions (“inner” and “outer”).

Otherwise, the representation; the

photograph will be inadequate.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burgin, Victor. Art, common sense and photography, The Camerawork Essays, edited by J.evans,pp:47-85, London, 1997 Cetin, Orhan Cem. Portrait Photography and Psychology, Unpublished Conference Text, Strasbourg Contemporary Arts Museum, Strasbourg, January 2010.

Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published by John Murray, London, 1827 Kuther,Tara. Freud's Theory of Personality: Development of the Psyche in Developmental Psychology, Connecticut, 2001.

Marcia, J. E. In Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, Identity in adolescence, New York, 1980.

Nisanyan,Sevan. Turkish Etymology Dictionary, 2002 http://www.nisanyansozluk.com/? k=vesikal覺k Rose, Barbara. Art in America, 81:2, pp. 83-125, February 1993 http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/read ings/Orlan/Orlan2.html Vancouver Art Gallery, 75 Years of Collecting, Thomas Ruff Review, Catalogue of a fourpart series of exhibitions held at the Vancouver Art Gallery, February, 2006 projects.vanartgallery.bc.ca/publications/75years/pdf/Ruff_Thomas_66.pdf

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