{"id":1126,"date":"2014-10-11T18:20:07","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T18:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=1126"},"modified":"2016-08-18T15:48:38","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T15:48:38","slug":"portraits-are-a-fine-art-so-lets-embrace-the-selfie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/portraits-are-a-fine-art-so-lets-embrace-the-selfie\/","title":{"rendered":"Portraits are a fine art, so let’s embrace the selfie"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Hannah Williams<\/a>, University of Oxford<\/em><\/p>\n

The BP Portrait Award 2014<\/a>, which opens at the National Portrait Gallery this week, might seem to some like the celebration of a dying art. In our digital age, portraiture might seem to be less and less relevant when you can just snap a picture of someone with a camera. Or, of yourself. The selfie has taken self-representation even further and made it even easier. So do we just have a traditionalist or nostalgic attachment to painted portraiture?<\/p>\n

This is not a question about the difference between painting and photography, but rather about what a portrait actually is and how it differs from other images. The first thing that distinguishes portraits is fairly obvious: they are images of real individuals, not generic figures or inanimate objects. The second thing, and the key point of definition according to the 18th century art theorist Roger de Piles<\/a>, is that a portrait is an attempt to render that real individual so exactly, that the image encapsulates not only the physical traits of their body, but also the emotional traits of their soul. A portrait, in other words, is one person\u2019s attempt to capture another person completely.<\/p>\n

So a portrait is essentially the trace of an encounter. When looking at a portrait \u2013 meeting the sitter\u2019s gaze or surveying their body \u2013 we often feel a sense of intimacy or connection, because what we\u2019re experiencing is someone else\u2019s engagement with that person. We\u2019re looking at a trace of their interaction \u2013 at how one person sees another person.<\/p>\n

This is very clear in the finalists for this year\u2019s BP Portrait Award. Each portrait represents a human relationship. There is Thomas Ganter\u2019s encounter with a homeless man on the street outside a museum, which won the prize<\/a>. Richard Twose\u2019s encounter with someone he saw on television, but got to know during their sittings, and David Jon Kassan\u2019s encounter with his mother during a visit in his own home, were also shortlisted.<\/p>\n

No matter the style \u2013 expressive, realistic, or abstracted \u2013 a portrait is a dialogue between artist and sitter, and the image on the canvas a witnessing of the varying degrees of intimacy in these human conversations.<\/p>\n

\"\"
David Cameron takes a selfie.<\/span>
\nStefan Rousseau\/PA Wire<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Definitions of portraiture in the digital age took on new significance last year, when the Oxford English Dictionary announced its new word of 2013<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Selfie \u2013 noun, informal; a photograph taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to social media.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What has been fascinating about the rise of the selfie is that the definition turned it into a phenomenon. Immediately following the OED\u2019s formal definition, a vague cultural practice became a category of representation. Something that teenagers were doing on social media became something that US presidents and British prime ministers did at meetings with heads of state (even when those meetings took place at funerals<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Before selfies made the act of self-representation available to anyone with a smartphone, self-portraiture had been the preserve of artists alone. But while this sub-category of portraiture has a long history in art, the word itself is not nearly so old. According to the OED, \u201cself-portrait\u201d did not appear in the English language until 1831 \u2013 and in France, autoportrait<\/em> did not make it into the Dictionnaire de l\u2019Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise until 1928.<\/p>\n

When Sir Joshua Reynolds painted himself<\/a> in his Royal Academy robes in 1780, or when Gustave Courbet painted his dramatically self-reflexive The Desperate Man<\/a> in the 1840s, neither artist was painting a \u201cself-portrait\u201d (or \u201cautoportrait<\/em>\u201d), per se.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Adolph Menzel, The Artist\u2019s Foot, 1876.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But even before the term was coined, self-portraits were always different from portraits, just as selfies are different from other photos. If a portrait is a social encounter with another person, then a self-portrait is a perceptual encounter with one\u2019s own body \u2013 and all the physical constraints that such an act involves. The physiological impossibility of seeing oneself has fascinated artists for centuries, inspiring ingenious works that play with these constraints (like Brett Whiteley\u2019s mirrored reflection seeing himself seeing<\/a>) or escape them entirely (like Menzel\u2019s foot, where he attempts a true phenomenological experience of his own body).<\/p>\n

Even with the aid of a smartphone, these same physical constraints give the selfie that distinctive look, with its tell-tale signs of production \u2013 a head shot, often to the side of the foreground, sometimes with a bit of outstretched arm. But this is also exactly why the selfie has taken off. It has provided everyone with the opportunity to experiment with those physical constraints of self-seeing and self-representation, giving rise to the plethora of sub-sub-categories (belfies, welfies, shelfies, etc) that are all attempts to do with a camera what artists like Whiteley and Menzel did in paint.<\/p>\n

As digital technologies provide new scope for experimenting with acts of portrayal, selfie-ists have much to learn from painters of the past and present. Portraiture is clearly far from a dying art.<\/p>\n

The BP Portrait Award 2014<\/a> is showing at London\u2019s National Portrait Gallery until September 21.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Hannah Williams does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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