‘‘honorable’’ self, it defined itself against a shadow
archive, which included ‘‘the poor, the diseased, the
insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female, and
all embodiments of the unworthy.’’ In his studyThe
Burden of Representation, historian John Tagg
aligns photography with institutions developed for
observing, disciplining, and producing the modern
subject: schools and factories, hospitals and pris-
ons. Both Tagg and Sekula rightly argue that one
cannot fully understand the phenomenon of the
portrait photograph as it developed in the nine-
teenth century without considering its close ties to
physiognomy and phrenology, which deduced
moral character from physical features.
Mathew Brady and Nadar, two nineteenth century
figures who pioneered portrait photography in
America and France, respectively, created bodies of
work that suggest that portrait photography lends
itself to the creation of cultural archives, thus per-
forming a documentary purpose not envisioned by
the photographer while making his pictures. This
tendency is exemplified by the work of German
photographer August Sander. A professional por-
trait photographer, for Sander photographic portrai-
ture became a tool for seeing, studying, and
documenting how the individual is shaped by and
placed within culture and history. In his portrait
archivesAnlitz der Zeit(The Feature of Time, 1929)
andMenschen des 20. Jahrhunderts(People of the
Twentieth Century)—which was not completed due
to the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich—Sander sought to
delineate the visual outline of Weimar Germany’s
social order. If Tagg’s claim that ‘‘[t]he portrait is a
sign whose purpose is both the description of the
individual and the inscription of social identity’’ is
true, we would have to say that Sander’s austere
portraits depict individuals, but their individuality is
secondary to Sander’s attention to social identity and
type. Withholding his portrait subjects’ names, San-
der instead titled his photographs according to the
social type or occupation the subjects represent.
Young Woman, Revolutionaries, Working Student, The
Painter, Communist, Young Mother, Middle Class.
Each portrait is distinct, but Sander’s archives work
by the logic of comparison, as the mechanisms of
social hierarchies become evident in the differences
and similarities between the images, especially in the
clothing, posture, and placement of the subjects.
Graham Clarke comparesPeople of the Twentieth
Centuryto a ‘‘social map’’ for identifying ‘‘a hierar-
chy of social position and status within the dominant
culture.’’ Confiscated by the Nazis and commended
by Benjamin as a training manual for understanding
imminent social codes, it is tempting to read subver-
sion within Sander’s stoic, incisively detailed por-
traits. However, it is more accurate to claim that
this work substantiates Sekula’s contention that the
portrait photograph operates both ‘‘honorifically
and repressively’’ as Sander’s portraits rely on a
latent physiognomic logic and fix individuals into
social types—tenets of Nazi racism—while they also
delineate the actuality to class structure and oppres-
sion and place the working classes in the frame of
cultural visibility.
Modernist visual art’s splitting of the sign from
its referent challenged the mimetic premise of the
portrait photograph, which relies on securing the
relationship between physical and actual ‘‘appear-
ance’’ of the individual and the portrait’s visual
representation. In ‘‘Residual Resemblance: Three
Notes on the Ends of Portraiture’’ (1994), Buchloch
explains that ‘‘[i]n portraiture, a seemingly natural
and guaranteed nexus between object and represen-
tation had appeared particularly evident: in fact,
mimetic resemblance had been one of the category’s
founding conditions.’’ It is the painting movement
Cubism that dismantles the portrait’s mimetic foun-
dation, as Pablo Picasso’s Cubist ‘‘portraits’’—and
particularly the depictions of his dealers from
1910—only include representations of their facial
features to suggest their vanishing significance. The
portrait photograph, however, remained a fre-
quent, if not dominant part of modernist projects.
For self-consciously modern and avant-garde
artists, portraiture was a way to imagine and simu-
late familial relations among peers and document
the intersubjective dimensions of collaborations. In
Alfred Stieglitz’s circles, photographers made por-
traits of each other to build an image of collective
pursuit and affinity. The twilight grays and crafted
tones of Pictorialist portraits were well suited to the
artistry Stieglitz and Edward Steichen hoped to
bring to the photograph. Even figures associated
with highly experimental forms in the 1920s and
1930s such as Man Ray, Florence Henri, Maurice
Tabard, and Jaromir Funke made numerous por-
traits. Man Ray photographed key figures in the
European avant-garde as though seeking to test the
portrait’s expressive range. A statement written by
Andre ́Breton encapsulates Ray’s approach: ‘‘The
portrait of a loved one should not be only an image
at which one smiles but also an oracle one ques-
tions.’’ The most famous of Man Ray’s portraits are
those of Marcel Duchamp performing as his femi-
nine alter ego Rrose Se ́lavy (1923–1924). In these
portraits, Duchamp looks like a fashion model;
(s)he wears a hat decorated with a black-and-white
geometric pattern, and his graceful hands and
ringed fingers are elegantly poised around a fur
collar to draw attention to his made-up lips andPORTRAITURE