eyes. Similar in spirit to the self-portraits of the
surrealist Claude Cahun, Ray’s portraits of Du-
champ reveal the self to be a malleable surface
receptive to performance, resistant to a fixed gender
identity, and capable of continual change, an arena
that was to be thoroughly explored in the late dec-
ades of the twentieth century.
Twentieth century American portrait photogra-
phy was less explicitly experimental, more likely to
be rooted at least in the idea of depicting actualities.
Jacob Riis, who began as a police beat photogra-
pher, depicted immigrants living in New York tene-
ments with the express aim of changing conditions
and enacting more progressive social policies. A
generation later, Lewis Hine began his work as a
social photographer when he photographed immi-
grants arriving at Ellis Island. In 1908, Hine went to
work for the National Labor Committee and docu-
mented children working in dangerous, exploitative
conditions. Both Riis and Hine created photo-
graphs of people that reveal their place within
social, historical, and economic circumstances,
and ideas of both human singularity and shared
collectivity—embedded in the history and concept
of the portrait—informed their work. As would
Sander in Europe, Riis and Hine expanded the
literal and figurative frame of the portrait to include
the subject’s surroundings, often with the idea of
soliciting the public’s sympathetic gaze.
Influenced by Hine’s social conscience and Stie-
glitz’s romantic modernism, the work of Paul Strand
is best known as a fulfillment of ‘‘straight photogra-
phy,’’ with its austere attention to abstract forms. But
Strand created some of the century’s most compelling
and well-known portraits,Blind(1916), featuring a
blind beggar woman, and Portrait, Washington
Square Park(1916), depicting a wizened, introspec-
tive, well-dressed woman. Strand’s clear, scrutinizing
focus and narrow framing seem to detach these por-
trayals from the world of human interaction.
Because there was in the early years of the cen-
tury (which continues today) the need to depict the
actuality of human suffering, portraiture was an
important but implicit part of the documentary
projects commissioned by the Farm Security
Administration in the 1930s. InLet Us Now Praise
Famous Men(1936), Walker Evans managed to
create images of the farmer families that are reveal-
ing but not exploitative. In another of the century’s
most famous portraits,Annie Mae Burroughs, Hale
County, Alabama, 1936, Evans created a subtle but
compelling design as the shapes and lines of her
eyes, mouth, hair, collarbones, and clothing seem
to reverberate from the pattern of wood she is
posed against. These design elements are second-
ary, however, to the photograph’s focus on the
complexity of Burrough’s expression, which is fra-
gile and stoic at the same time.
Evans had a talent for creating photographs that
comment upon the portrait’s place within cultural
imaginaries and narratives. Faces, Pennsylvania
Town, 1936places the profiles and inquiring looks
of two young rural men in contradistinction to a
barely focused crowd behind them. His iconic image
Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936,packedwith
small head-and-shoulder studio portraits, reveals
how standardized and commodified the twentieth-
century self had become and comments upon the
portrait’s role in standardizing the visual form in
which that commodification appears.
Though not often identified as such, portrait
photography is a prevalent aspect of contemporary
art photography, particularly when the politics of
racial, sexual, and class identities are under scrutiny.
In the 1980s, artists placed the portrait in a cultural
and psychic field bordered by two intentions: high-
lighting the various social forces that impinge upon
identity construction and enacting the subversive
possibilities of performance. Nan Goldin’sBallad
of Sexual Dependency(1986) is an extended group
portrait of the lower East Side’s sexual underground,
and the self portrayed in the photographs’ thick
velvet colors is masked, bruised, and tragically
posed in the search for emotional and sexual fulfill-
ment. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cindy Sher-
man continued her investigation of self-portraiture
by photographing herself within the poses and garish
costumes of Old Masters’ paintings. With prosthetic
noses and breasts, wigs, and thick, obvious makeup,
Sherman does not disappear within these images but
excavates and highlights the gendered physicality
repressed by their ‘‘old master’’ status.
Many contemporary photographers draw on the
portrait to confront the predictability of viewers’
perceptions. The early work of Lorna Simpson
refutes the portrait’s expected focus on the face by
photographing African-American women with their
backs turned or their faces covered with words and
phrases of uncertain meaning. These ‘‘anti-portraits’’
suggests that the perceptual apparatus for seeing and
naming African-American women is perpetually
inadequate. Nikki S. Lee and Tomoko Sawada
reproduce the self’s ability to stage itself within the
theatres and factories of identity, implicitly criti-
quing both the assumed malleability and invisibility
of Asian-American women. At another pole of
intention, the German photographer Thomas Ruff
creates bare and grand, larger-than-life portrait
photographs, hyper-real with detail that seem to re-
duce place, history, and culture to the particularitiesPORTRAITURE