More Conversation about "The Real Thing"/The Obama Portraits

Barak Obama by Kehinde Wiley, Michele Obama by Amy Sherald

HOT TAKE: Too fashionable. Too decorative. Will they seem dated too soon? Gads, it doesn't look like Michelle much.  Why the distracting dress? What does Barak's arm gesture communicate? Kehinde Wiley uses assistants lavishly I hear.  What's with the
foliage?  Very gay. In being not black, they're both black.  Cool. 

Kehinde Wiley’s signature portraits are devoted to depicting everyday African Americans transposed into extraordinary settings inspired by historic paintings of aristocrats. Obama acknowledged the risks of asking Wiley to adapt his style for a presidential portrait, joking that he asked the artist not to give him a scepter or mount him on a horse: “I’ve got enough political problems without you making me look like Napoleon. You’ve got to bring it down just a touch.”   - from "Hyperallergic", 2-11-18

New York Review of Books, Feb. 15, 2018 – by Lucy McKeon

(excerpts)   ON PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND

EXPERIENCE

…The more I thought about documenting what I saw, the more keenly aware I was of the moments I failed to apprehend. I began to distrust my impulse to document because of the feeling of loss that increasingly accompanied it.

…Today, behind the computerized shutter-click of a smartphone camera, I still sometimes sense in myself and in others the impulse to remember something before it’s over—to make some use of an experience even as it’s still happening.

Some might explain this as the artist’s instinct to capture and transform. From another perspective, it’s the intellectual’s urge to analyze, to further experience the experience. Or is it a kind of compulsion—in its most cynical form, the capitalist’s need to consume the moment, to own it?

We increasingly make commodities of our experiences, transformed into data that is sold to companies in order to sell us still more things. “A way of certifying experience,” Susan Sontag writes, “taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”

Is there a moral imperative to accept experience? Making an image is also purposeful.

Comes down to artist intentionality.

One thinks of the tourist too busy photographing to see the actual living that is occurring all around him. He forces a fleeting present more quickly into the realm of that-has-been, and the local passersby laugh at his shortsightedness.

But in this eagerness lies the knowledge, too, that this moment—this afternoon, this day, this life—will soon be over, and that one cannot keep alive what will necessarily fade. 

“Now, one November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs,” writes Roland Barthes at the start of Part Two of his posthumous book, Camera Lucida. Here, his idea of photography’s essence, what he calls that-has-been, takes on a double meaning.

 Unlike what we perceive in other media (painting, literature), we know that the thing captured by a photograph was irrefutably once there; in this sense, the photograph “is authentication itself.” That-has-been, and you can’t say it hasn’t. But “by shifting this reality to the past,” no matter whether the subject is alive or not, “the photograph suggests that it is already dead.” That-has-been and is no longer.
Barthes sees, in a photograph of his mother as a young girl, her impending death—a death that has, in fact, already occurred—which implies his own.

This is about the ability to be in immediacy afforded us by human consciousness...perhaps the value of doing so

…Surrounded by smartphones and faced with the ever-increasing democratization of the camera, we find ourselves in the age of supercharged mechanical reproduction, where new quandaries about purpose, control, and authenticity arise. (See recent article by Preciadio about reproductive rights in an industrial society) Recently, a friend whose wedding was approaching fretted over whether or not to outlaw phones at her ceremony—she didn’t want errant photographs to exist on the Internet outside her supervision. Photography creates “a new social value, which is the publicity of the private,” Barthes observed, well before social media.

 In Italo Calvino’s story “The Adventure of a Photographer,” Antonino, a “hunter of the unattainable,” obsesses—as I once did—over how to adequately capture real life in photographs, finally to the point of madness.

“The life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself,” writes Calvino. What else is a “personal brand” but a commemoration of the self in advance?

Style should emanate from within, be a result of authenticity.

Composing a photograph requires that the photographer choose what makes it into the frame. We create a frame, too, with the photos we choose to share. The sheer glut of images today demands to be filtered and curated so that only the self-affirming remain—and whether they’re flattering images, or self-deprecating, or parodic, it amounts to the same: the constructed and projected self.

…For Barthes, even the pre-digital photograph—static, impossible to read—“actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.” The only photograph of his mother, he writes, “which has given me the splendor of her truth is precisely a lost, remote photograph, one which does not look ‘like’ her, the photograph of a child I never knew.” It isn’t a likeness that moves him, but “her truth,” something like Walter Benjamin’s aura.

I worry that the memories that I have are actually created by the photographs. Little

co-incides.  Or does the photo summon a real memory?

It indicates a certain essence or authenticity in spite of what Benjamin saw as the problem with the medium, which he thought removed a work of art from its unique “presence in time and space.” “The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture,” Benjamin writes. “For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face.”

…writes Toni Morrison. “You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.” And yet, there Morrison was, writing it down. How to determine the point at which it all becomes enough?