The Historical Portrait
In the earlier portraits the kind of sitter you would see would be an important person. For example Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait of George Gisze. This portrait provides a definitive image of George Gisze who was a sixteenth-century London merchant in his work place. However portraits were not just "mimesis" but more complex. "Portraits are not just likenesses but works of art that engage with ideas of identity as they are perceived, represented, and understood in different times and places". Other important people would have been members of the aristocracy, monarchs, emperors, courtiers and ecclesiasts. Later the subject of portrait became more varied to include court dwarfs, tailors and other tradesmen.
The type of mediums that were used incude paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, photographs, coins and medals. The forms that they could take were images in newspapers or magazines or on mosaics, pottery, tapestry and bank notes. Portrait jars were common in ancient Peru and in the eighteenth-century England there was a brief vogue for portraits woven from hair. Other forms incuded busts and silhouettes.
Some of the reasons that the portraits were commissioned were to glorify monarchs, politicians and church men and show virtue or heroism of the sitter. For example in the Queen Elizabeth I portrait.
In this portrait of Queen Elizabeth I she is wearing a massive dress made from a lot of fabric and jewels that would have been very expensive to make, this is to show how much money she has and how much people would work for her to give her what she wanted. On the table under her hand is a globe to show how powerful she is being the queen, and with a crown sat behind her. The two images behind her show the seas and symbolise how she controls a lot of land because of her reign of power.
Photography and the Portrait
When Roland Barthes is discussing his mother in the Winter Garden image he is mouning over her death so he has a desire to know and to recognise his mother as he looks through photographs left behind. An image of his mother as a young child leads Barthes to confront the connection between photography and death. All photographs carry "an indexical relationship to their referents". I think Barthes is trying to say that photography creates a "persistent presence" of the subject and what he calls "That-has-been". In this example the reality of his mother's presence within that winter garden many years before he knew her. I think he is also trying to say each picture also conveys its relationship to time and hence to death. Also Barthes notes that the "That-has-been" is a frozen moment that will "touch him like the delayed rays of a star". Barthes can see in the "Winter Garden Photograph" both the reality of his mother before he knew her and he can recognise that she will die. Among all of the snapshots of her long life he was searching for the true her. I think Barthes is also trying to say that the image fights change (the ultimate change being death.) Barthes would decide that the genius of photography was the specificity of the subject of the image, the subject really was there.
Painting
Strength - the artist can influence the portrait in what it says about a person by changing anything about the painting as the time goes on.
Weakness - The portrait changes depending on the skill and style of the artist. It takes time to create a painting.
Photography
Strength - you capture the true facial features of a sitter and the true representation of what you are photographing.
Weakness - you don't have much range of what you can change in the photograph.
Photographic portraiture is both objective and subjective as it depends of the viewers opinion of photography and the photographers style. No matter how you take a photograph there will always be someone that does not have the same view as you do for that image. Even if you take a photo of someone and find a photo you love they may still not like that photo at all. Photographic portraiture will never be only objective or subjective.
The representation of a sitter in a photograph depends on the photographer and their purpose. They can direct the sitter to show emotion or character. They can also change the pose, framing, lighting and any of the composition of the image.
The Alternative Portrait
Orlan
Orlan is a french artist who uses plastic surgery as art and performance. In an interview Orlan said she "tried to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around." The idea was to bring 'difference' and the acceptance of differences and how it is looked upon. This is because in society plastic surgery is usually to improve appearance to reach 'perfection'. Orlan has inverted the 'norm' of plastic surgery so that it doesn't limit her identity but makes it "nomadic, mutant, shifting, differing". Orlan wants to combine the ideals of female beauty as depicted by male artists for example she wants to have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme's Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana (as depicted in a 16th-century French School of Fontainebleu painting), and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. This can be seen in this self portrait of her. The surgery intended to enhance her brow like the Mona Lisa has left her with two bumps that some people refer to as horns. She is continually challenging society's view of both identity and beauty. Orlan is not interested in the materiality of what she creates she just wants to get to its conceptual essence. During an interview Orlan was asked if her work was narcissistic or exhibitionist and she said it doesn't matter what it is in itself but if it says something about society or not. She aims to break barriers between sexes and genders, generations and artistic practices. She changes her materials and style to find the best solution for what she wants to achieve.
My own Distressed Portrait
I don't really know what I was trying to say in my image but looking through it I could have been saying that the colours of the image represent anger or distress. The image of the cats face staring out is instead of the human eyes could be interpreted as protection maybe. The image of the rose is being destroyed by the fire which could symbolise destroying the inner peace and confusion and the graphics as one could mean growth in life. 