Ah! The famous portraits: Mona Lisa by Da Vinci, The Blue Boy by Gainsborough, George Washington by Stuart, and others, as they say, too numerous to mention. One assumes that people sat for these portraits, a bit of a time-consuming process. And then the photographic portraits, Afghan Girl, 1984 by McCurry, Nelson Mandela, 1990 by Leibovitz, and Marilyn Monroe by Stern. Again, too numerous to count.
You have a readily available camera in your phone, or you have a Nikon or Canon, and you use them as the mood strikes. It’s a second’s worth of work, and you can in a digital age swamped by memory cards take as many pictures as you like, from near or far, in light or dark, in forbidden or free places, and of anyone or thing you fancy to freeze in place and time. Think of the difference between your on-the-spot digital photography and the more time-consuming portraits made by professional photographers and the even more time-consuming portraits made by painters.
Before the camera, the brush and wall or canvas were the instruments. The process of capturing the essence of a person wasn’t as easy as it has been since the invention of cameras. And the digital age advanced the process of photography over the more cumbersome and more limited 35 mm film cameras.
Those famous one-time-only portraits in oil on canvas or paint on wall probably give us more of a sense of the artists’ essences than the pictures you take give us a sense of your essence. You can snap, snap, snap; images are as numerous as clicks, and a single setting gets an indefinite number of interpretations, from a bit of changed light behind a flickering candle to half a blink of the subject’s eyelid. Those famous portrait painters couldn’t get all those changes that you get in your multiple pictures.
Think now of sitting for a portrait artist. You want something of your essence to be in the painting. What nuance do you want others to see in you. You realize, of course, that you change moment to moment. Yet, in that oil-on-canvas, only a momentary you, one seen through the eyes of the painter, will travel through time. Is that the real George Washington we see captured by Stuart? We don’t have multiple images.
How would you pose for posterity if you had only a single sitting to represent your entire life?
You have a readily available camera in your phone, or you have a Nikon or Canon, and you use them as the mood strikes. It’s a second’s worth of work, and you can in a digital age swamped by memory cards take as many pictures as you like, from near or far, in light or dark, in forbidden or free places, and of anyone or thing you fancy to freeze in place and time. Think of the difference between your on-the-spot digital photography and the more time-consuming portraits made by professional photographers and the even more time-consuming portraits made by painters.
Before the camera, the brush and wall or canvas were the instruments. The process of capturing the essence of a person wasn’t as easy as it has been since the invention of cameras. And the digital age advanced the process of photography over the more cumbersome and more limited 35 mm film cameras.
Those famous one-time-only portraits in oil on canvas or paint on wall probably give us more of a sense of the artists’ essences than the pictures you take give us a sense of your essence. You can snap, snap, snap; images are as numerous as clicks, and a single setting gets an indefinite number of interpretations, from a bit of changed light behind a flickering candle to half a blink of the subject’s eyelid. Those famous portrait painters couldn’t get all those changes that you get in your multiple pictures.
Think now of sitting for a portrait artist. You want something of your essence to be in the painting. What nuance do you want others to see in you. You realize, of course, that you change moment to moment. Yet, in that oil-on-canvas, only a momentary you, one seen through the eyes of the painter, will travel through time. Is that the real George Washington we see captured by Stuart? We don’t have multiple images.
How would you pose for posterity if you had only a single sitting to represent your entire life?
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