Photographic Portraits Research Articles

Photography, Identity, and Migration

This article examines the politics of interwar colonial identification practices put into place by the French colonial state in order to curtail the mobility of colonial (im)migrants. I argue that photography was used as a tool of imperial control in both French West Africa (AOF) and metropolitan France, since colonial men’s inability to provide the required photographic portraits often prevented them from moving around the empire. In response, colonial subjects appropriated photography in alternative ways to subvert these administrative restrictions. Moreover, they took advantage of metropolitan racial stereotypes to contest Western identification practices.

PEDIA: prioritization of exome data by image analysis

PurposePhenotype information is crucial for the interpretation of genomic variants. So far it has only been accessible for bioinformatics workflows after encoding into clinical terms by expert dysmorphologists. MethodsHere, we introduce an approach driven by artificial intelligence that uses portrait photographs for the interpretation of clinical exome data. We measured the value added by computer-assisted image analysis to the diagnostic yield on a cohort consisting of 679 individuals with 105 different monogenic disorders. For each case in the cohort we compiled frontal photos, clinical features, and the disease-causing variants, and simulated multiple exomes of different ethnic backgrounds. ResultsThe additional use of similarity scores from computer-assisted analysis of frontal photos improved the top 1 accuracy rate by more than 20–89% and the top 10 accuracy rate by more than 5–99% for the disease-causing gene. ConclusionImage analysis by deep-learning algorithms can be used to quantify the phenotypic similarity (PP4 criterion of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics guidelines) and to advance the performance of bioinformatics pipelines for exome analysis.

Remember Me: Instagram, Selfies and Libraries

ABSTRACTWhile selfies continue to be characterised as part of a narcissistic moment in current history, when embedded as part of a library engagement project, they convey a wealth of nuanced material about their subjects, the role of the library, and perceptions about memory. Social photography, through applications such as Instagram, can reveal much about the social and cultural life of a place and its people and in turn, generate insights into what is valued. Yet few studies have focussed on libraries and Instagram, and almost none to date have examined the public library context. This article examines publicly-generated Instagram data created during a large library project in Australia to argue that the role of the library as memory collector and shaper of histories about people and place is critical to the exchange that occurred via way of selfies. Photographic portraits of the self – intimate and personal digital objects – are eagerly exchanged in turn for an opportunity to be remembered and for participating in a project that assembles and shapes public memory. Findings suggest that social photography projects containing intersections of people, libraries and memorialising a moment in time are powerful ways in which library publics can be engaged.

Trophy Hunter: Ulrich Seidl’s Portraits and Safari

Abstract The Austrian director Ulrich Seidl often films interview subjects as though they were posing for portrait photographs, and Seidl maintains that one of his major influences is the photographer Diane Arbus. This article examines how this high level of control over a film’s frames reveals strategies central to his filmmaking and especially to his documentary films. Seidl is particularly concerned with depicting his subjects’ complicity in the exploitation of labor, as seen in Safari (2016), a film about Austrians who travel to Namibia to hunt and collect trophies. Seidl presents viewers with unforgiving portraits of Austrian tourists, as he employs nearly every one of his trademark techniques to highlight the many contradictions behind his subjects’ perspectives.

Large Direct Heads: Robert Crawshay’s Dream of Life-Size Photography

In the mid-1870s, Robert Crawshay started a now-forgotten contest designed to promote the development of direct life-size photography in Britain and the advent of a more objective photographic portrait. The contest saw much enthusiasm and many entries, but, as this article argues, ultimately ended up setting back the very causes it sought to advance. The competition shone a spotlight on problems with focus, tone, and especially scale when it came to the ‘life-size’ direct portrait, and it managed to promote the role of subjectivity and the superiority of enlargement instead of its preferred ends.

Book review: Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914 The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910

Book review: Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914 The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910

Refaced/Defaced: Using Photographic Portraits of Khmer Rouge Perpetrators in Justice, Education and Human Rights Activism in Cambodia

Refaced/Defaced: Using Photographic Portraits of Khmer Rouge Perpetrators in Justice, Education and Human Rights Activism in Cambodia

Single image portrait relighting

Lighting plays a central role in conveying the essence and depth of the subject in a portrait photograph. Professional photographers will carefully control the lighting in their studio to manipulate the appearance of their subject, while consumer photographers are usually constrained to the illumination of their environment. Though prior works have explored techniques for relighting an image, their utility is usually limited due to requirements of specialized hardware, multiple images of the subject under controlled or known illuminations, or accurate models of geometry and reflectance. To this end, we present a system for portrait relighting : a neural network that takes as input a single RGB image of a portrait taken with a standard cellphone camera in an unconstrained environment, and from that image produces a relit image of that subject as though it were illuminated according to any provided environment map. Our method is trained on a small database of 18 individuals captured under different directional light sources in a controlled light stage setup consisting of a densely sampled sphere of lights. Our proposed technique produces quantitatively superior results on our dataset's validation set compared to prior works, and produces convincing qualitative relighting results on a dataset of hundreds of real-world cellphone portraits. Because our technique can produce a 640 × 640 image in only 160 milliseconds, it may enable interactive user-facing photographic applications in the future.

The ‘Occupied Lens’ in Wartime China: Portrait Photography in the Service of Chinese ‘Collaboration’, 1939–1945

This article explores the importance of portrait photography to the wartime collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei, which governed parts of Japanese-occupied China from 1940 to 1945. The article demonstrates how, for a combination of practical, political, and cultural reasons, studio portraiture was chosen as one of the primary forms of media for the propagation of iconography by this administration. Studio portraiture was also, however, a realm in which this Chinese regime sought to stamp its own mark on visual culture, separate from the iconography of the occupying Japanese. The article demonstrates this by tracing the origins and fate of a number of widely circulated studio portraits of Wang taken in 1939, 1940, and 1941. This article also speculates about the possibility of identifying and defining an ‘occupied lens’ during the war, one which was clearly derivative of prewar forms yet evolved in ways which set it apart both from Japanese propaganda and from the visual culture of resistance.

Affective Images: The Transformative Power of Photography in Siri Hustvedt’s “The Blindfold”

Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold is a novel in which photography, or to be more specific, a photograph, seems to have the power to shape, obfuscate, and frame narrative. In what is primarily a close reading of the book, this paper will highlight the ways in which a photographic portrait alienates, emulates, and finally embodies its subject, the protagonist Iris Vegan. In maintaining a focused textual analysis, this paper is ultimately able to excavate the photograph’s role in the novel, with particular regard to narrative, temporarily, and subjectivity. Central to my argument is that the photographic portrait becomes a character it its own right. An antagonist and copy of Iris, which, through its photographic properties, seems to supersede Iris’s sociality, health, and reality. Following the close reading, the paper concludes in a more reflexive tone as it asks and answers what The Blindfold ’s affective portrait could mean for our own contemporary moment of proliferate and instant photographic social media, dubious provenance, and “fake” news.

Il volto fotografato logiche di potere e strategie di resistenza

Mugshots’ uses and practices—from Bertillon to Lombroso—show the photograph’s power: face and its photographic image are a form of control for protecting the establishment. However political value and subversive force of photography lies in the dialectic between known and unknown that the image of the photographed face produces. Photographic portrait produces new, previously unknown relationships if it isn’t only used for purposes of reproduction: so it is able to be in opposition to the established order and its imperatives that want to eliminate chaos and differences.

The success of Adi Nes’s "ctional photographic portraits: "gures of alterity and the utilization of memories in visual self-portraiture

Abstract. Bettel Carrie, The success of Adi Nes’s fictional photographic portraits: figures of alterity and the utilization of memories in visual self-portraiture. “Images” vol. XXV, no. 34. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 45–55. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.34.03.
 This paper demonstrates the way an autobiographer shapes his/her identity in the creation of his/her narrative. The autobiographer’s struggle in his/her understanding of the self is sometimes evident in the work. This project focuses specifically on the work of Adi Nes, an Israeli photographer. His photographs demonstrate the ways in which he feels like an outsider in Israel, as both a member of the Sephardic community and a homosexual. His photographs are staged, and he uses figures of alterity by projecting himself into his images with the use of models, which may lead the viewer to question the referentiality, or truthfulness, of each image. While demonstrating his identity through personal experience and memories, his images are created in the context of a stratified society, demonstrating the power dynamics of the military and the different groups that reside within Israel. The paper draws on images from three series – “Boys” (2000), “Soldiers” (1994–2000) and “Prisoners” (2000).

Brought on the Feels: A roundtable debrief of the public art project, We They

We They was a public art project created by staff and young people from queer youth services organization Hetrick-Martin Institute (HMI)<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn0001">1</xref> in collaboration with a faculty member, alumnus, undergraduate and graduate students from New York University (NYU)<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn0002">2</xref>. HMI and NYU are two different kinds of learning institutions located a mere block apart in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighbourhood. In the following roundtable discussion, project collaborators discuss their experiences working on the project and how the resulting artwork impacted them. Their discussion addresses themes such as transformative pedagogy, photographic portraiture; young queer people of colour, activating urban space and trust.

Transformation of portraits to Picasso’s cubism style

This paper presents an approach to the transformation of portrait photographs to Picasso’s cubism style using deep learning and image processing techniques. We obtain the side-view face by rotating the face model constructed from a frontal portrait image 90$$^\circ $$ and then replace the left half of the portrait by the side-view face. Our approach is applicable to online transformation of selfie photographs and potentially extendable to broader categories of images and artistic styles.

Delicate resurgence and divine embodiment: conceptual photographic portraits of women’s divine beauty

In this article concepts of divine beauty through studio photographic portraits, digitally manipulated including composite image layering are explored. Historically, feminine beauty has maintained a prominent place in society; however, recent research suggests a majority of women are dissatisfied with their appearance and view themselves negatively as a result of continuous exposure of unrealistic beauty ideals in media . For some women, an unhealthy attitude has developed leading to dramatic increases in female cosmetic surgeries. The feminine beauty “ideal” is ever-changing, and Peg Barand recognises the appeal for a new direction in recent research. The revival of the concept of Divine Beauty is a response to increasing pressure of unachievable expectations overwhelming women. Divine beauty is beyond the physical and associated with God, aesthetics and nature. The author's photographic series challenges modern Western attitudes of feminine beauty through a series of photographic portraits. Placement of objects such as flowers and butterflies have been used as props to signify divine beauty throughout the images. This series aims to portray a concept of feminine beauty as divine and seeks to question and offer insight into feminine aesthetics in the 21st century.

Jane says, an exhibition of works by Ann Shelton

jane says is an exhibition of works by Ann Shelton, that opened at the Denny Dimin Gallery in New York City, in Spring 2019. Ann’s sumptuous photographic portraits of botanic arrangements – arranged by the artist with an ikebana-like approach – present these contrivances in larger-than-life detail. Divorced from the domestic interior and titled both for the medicinal plants they feature and female archetypes, each botanic composition reveals an unexpected history of women’s plant knowledge and its suppression. An accompanying performance – assembled and choreographed by the artist – is constructed from a tapestry of quotes, and stories about the properties of plants, their historic use as contraceptives, for fertility and abortion. These arrangements show the plants contorted into obedience, just as colonization sought to control and claim our natural world and fellow species, and suppress indigenous and women’s botanic expertise. Now, we find ourselves at the brink of irreversible biodiversity loss and climate change, living in the era of the Anthropocene. Shelton’s work provokes us to consider not only humanity’s relentless depletion of the natural world, but the role women will play in a regenerative future.

Rostos desfigurados: repúdio de imagens no espaço público

Este artigo é sobre experienciar imagens como processo imagético interativo, como apontado por Bergson no livro Matéria e Memória, por meio de um aspecto dúbio do retrato fotográfico, em termos da sua recepção repudiada no espaço público. Apresentamos uma série de fotografias de quatro cidades latino-americanas que retratam rostos desfigurados intencionalmente. Recorrendo aos estudos de Deleuze, Bergson, Benjamin e Barthes, apontamos essas fotografias como testemunho documental de diferentes reações. As fotografias nos incitam a ir além do que os rostos desfigurados significam como signos icônicos, para serem vistas como indícios da interação dinâmica entre os retratos e os agentes desfigurantes anônimos, como uma imagem.

3D mug shot—3D head models from photogrammetry for forensic identification

No human face is like another, not even in monozygotic twins, which makes the face one of the most individualizing characteristic. It is for this reason that the human face is commonly used for identification purposes and police officers take portrait photographs of arrested persons, so-called mug shots. The disadvantage of these 2D mug shots is that the perspective, in which they are taken (usually frontal and lateral-right, left or both), cannot be changed after acquisition, thus limiting a potential comparison between a mug shot and surveillance footage or other visual recordings.Documenting a face in 3D would reduce this problem as it allows adjusting the perspective of the face for image comparisons depending on the needs of the investigator. We have developed a 3D mug shot system containing 26 digital single-lens reflex cameras arranged semi-circularly in a 200° arc with a 1.46 m radius around a height-adjustable chair. We generated photogrammetric models of a test person’s face captured by the mug shot system using three different focal lengths settings as well as 3D models of the same face with GOM Atos Triple Scan and Artec Space Spider. The 3D models were then analysed regarding the visibility of detailed morphological features in different regions of the face compared to 2D mug shots.Our results showed that our 3D mug shot system with its photogrammetric documentation generates 3D models with comparable surface quality to Artec-generated models, or even better quality, compared to GOM-generated models. The results of the morphological assessment were affected by the focal length and availability of texture information.In conclusion, the 3D mug shot system is a fast and efficient tool to generate 3D models of the face and may be used in addition to 2D photographs for the purpose of visual forensic identification based on images.

Art for Institutional Change: Legitimizing Women in STEM Through Visibility

The ADVANCE program strives to change institutional culture to promote gender equity among faculty in science, engineering, and social and behavioral sciences. This is a challenging goal, as most ADVANCE teams have experienced. We found that one powerful way to approach changing individuals’ perspectives and institutions’ cultures is through art. Our ADVANCE team at the University of Virginia built three exhibits—two physical exhibits on campus and one online exhibit—to portray and celebrate our women faculty through photographic portraits and oral history narratives of their experiences. Our aim was to make women visible in spaces in which they were historically barred or overlooked, such as in particular disciplines as well as at UVA itself, which only admitted women students in the 1970s. This paper documents how and why we used art to challenge assumptions about women scholars and how we evaluated the exhibits’ impact on the UVA community.

Frida Kahlo’s Photographic Posing: A Theoretical Approach to Visual Autobiographies

Artists’ autobiographies have been considered primary sources of information in Art History, while photographic portraits are generally intended as mimetic representations. However, both of these registers can also act as rhetorical strategies for the artist to construct a certain image of him or herself, and some artists have used photography to directly defy certain theoretical pillars of traditional autobiography. Such is the case of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. As this article demonstrates, in certain photographs Kahlo’s pose questions and undermines foundational notions of visual autobiographies. Through these photographic poses, she reveals the limits and obstacles of autobiographical practices to provide knowledge regarding an extra-diegetic point of reference. What is more, she ostentatiously displays her surgically operated body and distances herself from the standard image of normative bodies. In this way, Frida Kahlo builds and evokes her own photographic imaginary while transgressing some common features of traditional autobiographies.