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Those faces
[Photo courtesy Herb Snitzer]
Herb Snitzer, Miles at Newport. |
By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 19, 2002
From Dali to Chaplin and O'Keeffe to Rossellini, 24 celebrities are captured in a new exhibit that reveals the changing styles of portrait photography.
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ST. PETERSBURG -- Primitive tribes believed that if you reproduced a person's image, you stole part of his soul. They weren't far wrong.
Portraiture has always had a subtext of soul-searching, seeking to expose the personality along with the person. For most of the history of Western art, a portrait -- whether painting or sculpture -- was a status symbol enjoyed by the wealthy or celebrated. Photography, a more populist art medium, changed that. Today, for a few dollars, anyone's image can be captured permanently, in multiples.
But photography has also stoked our hunger for famous faces. Late 19th century publishers of the first magazines, created to serialize novels in installments for the new middle class, realized that photos of famous actors and writers helped sell their product. They still do.
And that enduring fascination is the reason "Famous Faces: Celebrity Portraits in Photography" at the Museum of Fine Arts will be popular. But more than that, the 24 images can also be studied as a timeline of the changing styles of portrait photography. Many of the photographs in the exhibition -- Philippe Halsman's images of Georgia O'Keeffe, Albert Einstein and Salvador Dali and some of Edward Steichen's portraits for Vanity Fair, for example -- will be familiar.
Among the earliest is a portrait of French writer George Sand by Nadar, who was as famous as many of those who sat for him. Sand lived an unconventional life, but here she is the picture of bourgeois respectability, conservatively dressed, eyes turned away from the camera, which stays at a respectful distance recording her as an object of veneration.
[Photo: ©The Phillipe Halsman Estate]
Phillipe Halsman, Albert Einstein
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Compare it to Herb Snitzer's visceral portrait of musician Miles Davis. His eyes, penetrating, menacing and sad, stare at us from tonal depths, the idea of tortured artist embodied. Richard Avedon made a name and fortune immortalizing beautiful women and clothes for fashion magazines such as Vogue. As if seeking a respite from so much physical perfection, he often used his portraits, such as that of poet Ezra Pound, to capture the famous in moments of vulnerability.
The only candid shot is Weegee's image of a morose James Dean, sitting alone, surrounded by a party. The fact that it is less revealing than some of the composed studio shots makes a point about portraiture. A good photographer can get a celebrity to let her hair down even when she knows she shouldn't. (An example, not in this exhibition, is Avedon's portrait of Marilyn Monroe, beautifully gowned and groomed, who probably expected a glamor shot but instead looks haggard, lost and frightened.)
But the portraits here, even when they are revealing, are not unkind. Steichen's shots of sculptor Constantin Brancusi, Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin are beautiful and elegant. And reverential, but that's no surprise since they were taken for Vanity Fair, which has always used art to serve celebrity in its fawning portraits.
Like Steichen, whose Vanity Fair portraits influenced him, Arnold Newman liked to put his celebrities in a context, but the raised piano top that dwarfs Igor Stravinsky is a more telling and profound detail than Chaplin's bowler hat.
The most recent photographs are those of Rodger P. Kingston, which are among the few color images. His portrait of Isabella Rossellini, taken in 1988, is a photograph of a photograph of the actor on the cover of Interview magazine. It is a nudge reminding us that the camera's reductive eye filters and alters reality even while it seems to reproduce it so faithfully.
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REVIEW: "Famous Faces: Celebrity Portraits in Photography" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg Saturday through Dec. 8. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $6, with discounts for seniors and students. Children 6 and younger are free. No admission is charged on Sunday. (727) 896-2667.
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