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Making Faces The Portrait is dead. Long live the Face!

What ‘the body’ was to photography in last decade of the twentieth century, ‘the face’ is to the first decade of the new millennium—a central motif, and highly contested terrain.

But ‘the face’ encompasses terrain far broader than is suggested by the term ‘portrait’. Indeed, a substantial number of contemporary imagemakers reject the conventional genre of portraiture, considering it to be fraught with tired conventions and discredited assumptions—concerning both the nature of the face itself, and the manner of its representation. As the body displaced the nude as a core focus of photographers, so the face is displacing the portrait.

Traditionally in photography, as in popular culture, the face has been considered the primary site and marker of individual identity. The photographer Paul Graham recently summed up this deeply-rooted belief when he defined portraiture as ‘one of the most profound things that one can do… to simply and truly see someone, and express their sentience. To reflect the inner self through external appearance.’

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