“ ‘The illiteracy of the future,’ someone has said, ‘will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.’ But shouldn't a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less considered an illiterate? Won't the inscription become the most important part of the photograph?”

—Walter Benjamin ¹

Seeing and believing are big notions with even bigger implications. More than a century and a half after its invention, the universal expectation of the photograph’s veracity is still what matters most when we see a photograph. Typically, people think photographic images reveal something truly important about the thing depicted. Yet, the photographic image alone cannot reveal everything, even if we could accurately read its visual linguistics. Hence the question above, posed by Walter Benjamin, in 1931. 

As observers, we bring to any image a wealth of intellectual and visual knowledge that, within a framework of expectations and assumptions about recognition, embraces extremes. It is those extremes that the five artists in Striking Resemblance utilize and ultimately embrace. Valérie Belin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, and Bill Viola make use of the camera’s ability to faithfully reproduce and seamlessly deceive. 

Using the tradition of the portrait and the notion of the formal “sitting” as their muse, as well as images in the collective consciousness (strangers vs. celebrities, well-known national figures vs. an actor playing everyman) the artworks in Striking Resemblance are wedged squarely between that thing that we call a “portrait” and the knowledge that we bring (or think we bring) to an image already fixed in our mind’s eye. 

It is indisputable that the photographic image forever changed the notion of portraiture. And given our accessibility to images and the ease of picture taking as we know it today, it is impossible to truly understand the impact of early photographic portraits (daguerreotypes, tin-types, carte de visites, cabinet cards). It should be noted however, that throughout recorded history the portrait’s novelty and scarcity were most directly the result of social and class distinctions. Portraits were for the “rich and famous.”² It was photography that changed (mercifully some will argue) the disparity of who was portrayed, while at the same time triggering a vast explosion of pictures of all kinds of people. 

After seeing a daguerreotype, Paul Delaroche, one of the most popular French painters of the early 19th century, famously declared “from today forward painting is dead.” Delaroche was not only suggesting the end of an art form, more specifically he was announcing the waning of the wealthy patron’s desire for a commissioned portrait. Nonetheless, it was not just the ordinary citizen and his immediate family that was photographed, but also many of the most famous individuals of the day (Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Victoria, John Wilkes Booth, and Pope Leo XIII).  As these portraits became available to the masses for purchase, their popularity was to such a degree that during the 19th century millions were collected.

While today we easily recognize famous people when we see their pictures in print, the 19th century celebrity portraits relied heavily on an inscription or caption or else risk the possibility of mistaken identity. But if the inscription is so important what becomes of a person’s identity when the photograph is unidentified? Yet, we discover much later that even in photography’s infancy in the 19th century a seemingly innocuous caption (AKA-inscription) was in fact playing fast and loose with photographic veracity.³

Photography however, with due respect to Delaroche, did not kill painting, in fact it fostered and enabled painters in the late 19th and early 20th century to free themselves from the confines of exact representation of their subjects. As painter Jean Renoir observed, in giving credit to Daguerre, the invention of photography “freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits. Now the shopkeeper who wants his portrait has only to go to the photographer. So much the worse for us, but so much the better for the art of painting.”⁴

Interestingly, it is this same liberation from “chores” as well as art historical conventions that has informed the artists in Striking Resemblance to use camera-based artwork to embrace and expand the portrait genre. The photographs and videos by Valérie Belin, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Bill Viola nonetheless have many of the attributes of those first photographic portraits; which in turn were influenced by the conventions of the portraiture. As much as the artists of the early 20th century felt free to expand the notion of portraiture beyond mere representation (or a re-representation that satisfied a patron’s specific desires—i.e. to look more beautiful) Belin, Becher/Robbins, Sugimoto and Viola’s unitization of the camera-made image is not solely about a likeness, commemoration, or significant revelation of a person’s “inner essence.” Their photographic portraits have become vehicles for exploring issues that extend beyond the typical to include identity, race, gender and individuality within a world driven to homogeny. It is as if in these challenging times, our nature directs us to look for things of comfort.

1

Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2: 1927–1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p.527.

2

Hiroshi Sugimoto, interview by Tracey Bashkoff, “The Exactness of The World: A Conversation with Hiroshi Sugimoto,” in Sugimoto Portraits, eds. Tracey Bashkoff and Nancy Spector, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000), p.28-29.

3

A bizarre fact which if verified will be the topic of another essay. But for now it will simply be a mere footnote in the history of photography.

“Many years ago, when Mr. Joseph Tussaud, under pressure of time and with very meagre material to go upon, produced a portrait of the late Pope Leo XIII directly after he was elevated to the papal chair, a certain well-known firm of photographers were at their wits' end to obtain a portrait of the new Pontiff, and the novel idea suggested itself to them of arranging to borrow for a short time Madame Tussaud's model, and there from obtain an original negative that might fulfil their requirements. This they accordingly did, and the object was achieved with remarkable success, for the portrait challenged detection. So lifelike was the picture that when it was placed upon the market beholders concluded that the Pope had sat for it.

Another firm of photographers, some time afterwards, and at great trouble and expense, succeeded in obtaining sittings from the Pope himself.

When the portrait taken from life appeared, and was compared with the photographs from the model, very grave doubt was raised as to whether the new portrait was really a good likeness, and many persons questioned its genuineness, much to the chagrin of the photographers who produced it."

John Theodore Tussaud, The Romance of Madame Tussaud’s, 2nd ed. (London: Odhams Press Limited, 1921), p.120–121.

4

Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, trans. Randolf and Dorothy Weaver (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1962), p.178, cited in Van Deren Coke, The Painter and the Photograph, exh. cat. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964), p.10, 66.