Portrait photography has the potential to intervene in how we look at others. Portrait photography cannot be looked at as truth, or as documentation, portrait photography can only ever represent an isolated and suspended moment in the life of the person pictured. To the degree that portrait photography attempts to offer a depiction of someone we never would have seen otherwise or offer some insight into an individual it betrays the lessons and promise of its own ontology. Portrait Photography’s being, like the ontology of looking proposed here becomes itself through questioning the decisions we make when looking.

Unfixing the Photograph: Portraiture and Its Discontents in Contemporary Photography examines how the photographic portrait work by Catherine Opie, Nikki S. Lee and yours truly, Ace Lehner critique the cultural authority of vision by intervening in the way we visually read people. This project considers the ways in which these photographic portraits resist re-inscription of identities into hegemonic representations of race, class, gender, and other oppressive systems. It also discusses their photographic strategies for making images that actively resist dominant paradigms of vision by engaging techniques of withholding, coding, complicating and cropping out visual information.

In order to look critically at portrait photography this way I have developed three interchangeable and mutually informing lenses. Picturing Without Showing: Strategies of Visbility and Resistance. The Distance of Proximity: Between the Photographer and the Subject. And Performing Identity: Hybrid Autoethnography, Self-Presentation and Performing for the Lens.

This project will be presented March 27th at California College of the Arts' 10th Anniversary Visual + Critical Studies Thesis Symposium.
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