The Norton Simon Museum presents Face It: The Photographic Portrait, on view through Aug. 11, 2014.
An exhibition of portraits by some of the most important artist-photographers of the 20th century, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater and Minor White. Drawn from the Museum’s significant collection of photographs, assembled largely in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the 20 works on view feature a range of subjects, from the young to the old, in varying poses and expressions, but all invoking us to look closer.
Portraiture customarily takes on the aura of fact, as it communicates information about a sitter’s visage. When captured through the mechanical lens of the camera, such likenesses impress us as vivid surrogates for reality. Face It: The Photographic Portrait considers the notional world—where ideas are balanced with facts—presented in the close-up. It assumes that there is more to the photographic portrait than meets the eye. In place of seeking a strict reportage of a subject’s features, or outright flattery, Face It bids us look for the affective moment, the human interest, and the metaphorical associations inherent in portraits of persons known or anonymous. When confronted with figures loosed from the conventions of traditional portraiture, we, as viewers, are prompted to be active rather than passive in our experience of the images. The intimacy that occurs in such an encounter with the informal or ambiguous conjures in us a psychology of looking.