Fantasies of being somebody: Auto / biographic potential of posing conventions

Abstract

The article examines the tension between the individual and the collective in current mainstream photographic practice, which is considered within the long-term historical context of commercial portraiture. The individualizing tendencies of this representational tradition as well as its status as (auto)biographical fiction were astutely analyzed by the Russian avant-garde thinkers Alexander Rodchenko and Osip Brik. Criticizing the persistence of “painterly” clichés in studio photography of their time, they saw these conventional elements as something that obscures and distorts reality, substituting for it a beautiful picture. For these leftist theorists, reality was primarily defined by the interplay of social forces, and isolating the subject within the picture frame was sufficient grounds for their disapproval. Taking up their notion of cliché applied particularly to posing, this article proposes to view it, instead, as an entry point into the usually invisible collective dimension of each individual portrait. The first section of the article discusses historical precedents to current mainstream photographic portraiture in terms of class- and gender-specific pressures on the sitters which have contributed to the homogenization of the genre’s visual canon. The suggestion to view stylistically similar images of individuals as expressing a latent collectivity is developed in the second part of the article, which analyzes Jana Romanova’s photographic series W through the theoretical framework borrowed from Lauren Berlant (“intimate public”, “female complaint”) and Gayle Letherby (“auto/biography”).