face to face

Nexus Theory and Practice in contemporary women’s photography

Face to Face

Directions in contemporary women’s portraiture.

This is the fifth volume in the Nexus series and takes its title from the philosophical theories of Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that the ‘face to face’ was the encounter with the other, which underpinned any notion of ethics. The author also explores the work of the phenomenologists Levinas and Edmund Husserl as a means by which to question our common assumptions about the nature of ‘representation’ and particularly the representation of the face. Is it possible to represent the face of the other without doing violence to it? What is the role of the self-portrait in this ‘face to face’ if the subject and the object are here simultaneous? 

Many contemporary women photographers address these issues within their work. Many artists who work in particularly within gender politics continue to protest against the objectification of ‘women’ in fine art and mass media. Historically the medium of photography has been more open to the female gender, arguably because photography is not truly seen as an art form within traditionalists like fine art or sculpture. Those who favour the more traditional views of art may see photography as a scientific discovery that is riddled? with contradictions? Uncertainties? Nevertheless, it is because of these characteristics that have made photography more accessible to female practitioners such as Florence Henri and Margaret Cameron. 

I say: ‘We regard a portrait as a human being,’ – but when do we do so, and for how long? Always, if we see it at all… we regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the person, the landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour and even perhaps as face reduced in scale struck them as inhuman.                                                                                                                                        Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Due to recent developments in theoretical photography, our confidence in the photographic representation of the human face has been dramatically undermined. As in all or most portraiture the ‘likeness’ of the subject is always strived to show in the image?  Roland Barthes ‘Camera Lucida’ states ‘Photography transformed subject into object.’

Susan Sontag holds similar views and compares the act of taking a photograph to that of shooting a gun (for example ‘we talk about “loading” and “aiming” a camera, about “shooting” a film’)

There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.