MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Who has not read Barthes’ meditation on a photograph—one never shown to the reader—of his mother as a little girl? Its physicality is undoubted, its sanctity likewise. What was it in that photo? Simply the noeme(essence) of photography—the evidentiary having-been-there-ness of a woman now gone. Decades earlier, writing his celebration of photography as the liberation of art from the elite hold of aura, Benjamin had allowed for one exception, namely, the portrait photo; the physical print somehow testifies to a was-there-ness thus retaining what Benjamin refers to as “cult value.” In a world where ephemerality and existential doubt increasingly held sway, that was-there-ness held a glimmer of nostalgia even hope. Decades later—neither the say-nothing portraits of Ruff nor the mocking superrealism of Cottingham’s “fictitious” subjects would disrupt the auratic hold of the photographic portrait. To be held in hand, wept over, or shredded in anger, it remained and does yet today in a class by itself.

This paper explores the 21st-century physical photographic portrait. Not the digital selfie, swiped hither and yon, and imprinted endlessly into our digital alter-self as though to cry out “yes, here I was,” but rather that physical print still somehow testifying to presence – in a world, spiritually and socially, too often the stuff of absence. It looks to the place of the portrait print in contemporary visual culture (e.g., Wearing’s masks, Samaras’s photo-transformations, or Hamilton’s recent ghosted presences) as well as the modern fascination with corpse photography (Serrano’s morgue work or portraits often sharing the deceased’s coffin). Concurrently, it considers the indexical hold of the physical portrait print as understood through such theoretical frameworks of was-there-ness as found in relic studies, Brown’s thing theory,and more sweeping considerations of the contemporary fetishistic role of the printed image.