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Portraiture and Photography

Antecedents: miniature painting and silhouette


François I of France
Jean Clouet (c.1535, oil on panel)
(Louvre)

Miniature portrait painting evolved in the Renaissance from the art of illuminating books.


Beethoven as a boy,
18th century silhouette portrait



Machine for drawing silhouettes.
From the 1792 English edition of
Johann Kasper Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy


Daguerreotype portraits





Daguerreotype of a young man
by T.H. Newcomer, Philadelphia.
Split leather case with the photographer's imprint on velvet mat.

source: http://www.antiquephotographics.com/Format%20Types/dags&ambros.htm


With rapid developments in the daguerreotype's materials, equipment and technique, portraiture, formerly a privilege of the powerful and the very wealthy, gained popularity and soon developed into a large industry providing a new commodity for mass consumption.

Prestige, utility, the human passion for the mimetic, narcissistic investment and the human desire for the kind of immortality conferred by memory come together in portraiture and in photographic portraiture. Photography can be understood as both an instrument of emotional attachment and the very index of human finitude. Thanks to photography, Zeno’ s paradox of time and distance turns into a description of the existential structures of individuality, a description of the temporal condition of the human subject.


Unknown photographer. Jabez Hogg making a portrait in Richard Beard' s Studio, 1843, daguerreotype

A daguerreotype describing the relationship between photographer and sitter, both immobilized, suspended in the extended instant, during the time of the exposure. The daguerreotype camera is seen in its role of mediator at the center of the composition. The photographic act can only be represented by momentary, real in-action.


Marcelo G. Lima






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