Portrait and Mugshot: Metonymical Foundation of Photographic Genres

Abstract

This article focuses on the genre distinction between artistic and legal photographs of faces: while the artistic portrait tends to express the singular soul of the person pictured, the biometric mugshot aims to scan singular physical traits without any psychological expression. How do these photographic genres allow us to identify the represented person? What do each of them seek to recognize? To grasp our metaphysical expectations of photographic technology, and thus to bridge the gap between discursive styles of these two photographic genres, I revise Derrida’s deconstruction of the law of genre. Further, I argue that Derrida’s and Nancy’s subversive readings of Kant’s concepts of parergon and schema help us to understand the rhetorical setting of the human mind, which organizes the photographic work of framing fragments. Finally, I explain the metaphysical conditions of possibility for both photographic genres by situating their opposite goals in the interval of personal recognition constructed by metonymical schematism.