What’s in a Face?

Blankness and
Significance in Contemporary
Art Photography*

JULIAN STALLABRASS

We have no intention, however, of making a fetish of

democracy. It may well be true that our generation
talks and thinks too much of democracy and too little
of the values which it serves.1

A prominent and distinct strand has become established in contemporary

art photography in which people are depicted in uniform series, usually one per
picture, and placed centrally in that picture, facing the camera head-on and gaz-
ing into the lens. These people are represented straightforwardly, without much
apparent intervention by the photographer, and the series displays manifestly uni-
form characteristics. Since many of the pictorial elements controlled by the
photographer are held as standard, variability from picture to picture occurs
mostly in the particularities of the subject. Youths are disproportionately repre-
sented. Sometimes short captions identify the subjects or their location, and
sometimes text of their reported statements accompanies the pictures. This strand
of images is visually akin to ethnographic photography of colonized peoples in
controlled situations, and of that photography closest to the most objectifying
type—that made with a measuring stick or standard grid.2
Such depictions can be seen in the work of Céline van Balen, Rineke
Dijkstra, Jitka Hanzlova, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Thomas Ruff, and Gillian Wearing,
among others, and in differing registers in some of the work of Tina Barney,
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Hellen van Meene, and Joel Sternfeld.

* I have presented earlier versions of this paper in various forums and am indebted to the percep-
tive comments of their participants. In particular, I would like to thank those who responded to the
paper at the symposium “Art in the Age of Globalization: Directions in Contemporary Art Since 1989”
at the University of Florida, Gainesville, including Alexander Alberro, Nora Alter, Whitney Davis, Hal
Foster, and Anne Wagner. I am also very grateful to Joanna Woodall of the Courtauld Institute for her
comments about Dijkstra’s work.
1. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1944), p. 52.
2. Such photographs were first made by James H. Lamprey, who in 1869 devised a standard mea-
suring grid against which subjects were photographed. Also in 1869 Thomas Huxley proposed using
standard views of subjects with a measuring rod. Such techniques were adopted by others. See James R.
Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books,
1997), pp. 149, 151.

OCTOBER 122, Fall 2007, pp. 71–90. © 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
72 OCTOBER

Rineke Dijkstra. Kolobreg,

Poland, July 23, 1992. 1992.
All images courtesy the artist.

The mode is also a regular feature of documentary photography, often as one part
of a larger repertory.3
On the face of it, the motive for raising that old specter of objectification
and domination is a puzzle, let alone that such a tactic should meet with art-world
approbation. After all, ethnographic photography was subjected in previous
decades to damning critique by theorists and artists who exposed its power
relations and drew links to the continued use of photography for surveillance,
classification, and control. Yet one immediate answer to the puzzle is to say that
this photography depicts subjects who are not, at least apparently, strongly differ-
entiated from their likely viewers. An examination of this work may illuminate
questions about the representation of difference and identity in the globalized art
world. Perhaps, too, the success of this deadpan but alluring trend is connected
to the political view of the subject under neoliberalism.

3. See, for example, the portraits and reported text in Zed Nelson’s Gun Nation (London:
Westzone, 2000).
What’s in a Face? 73

In this mode, an apparently objective manner of viewing shuns lyricism, overt

identification with the subject, and compositional effort on the part of the photog-
rapher. The subject remains still before the lens, showing little or no activity other
than self-presentation. The subject’s awareness of the camera is a manifest theme
of the picture, and this is demonstrated by the way that eyes meet lens. (A sequence
of pictures by Broomberg and Chanarin, which conforms to the main charac-
teristics of this strand but in which none of the subjects look into the lens, demon-
strates the importance of this aspect; without it, viewers are left to wonder about
what the subjects are doing, and whether they were aware of the camera.)4
It is possible to place these photographs by thinking of them in structural
opposition to other practices. In a spectrum of the photographic depiction of
people, they stand opposed to the mannered portraiture of celebrated subjects in
which extreme individuality of style and composition is congruent with the sup-
posed uniqueness of the subject. Their mode of depiction, by contrast, tends
toward the establishment of the anonymous type. In their formality and standard-
ization, they are also opposed to the quasi-anthropological participant-observer
model, in which photographers depict a social scene with which they are inti-
mately connected. While such depictions of marginal, often bohemian folk in
their natural habitat stretch back to Ed van der Elsken and more arguably Brassaï,
it is strongly represented in contemporary photography in the work of Richard
Billingham, Larry Clark, Corinne Day, and Nan Goldin, among others (and,
again, youth is often a feature).5 Here the subjects seem to have forgotten about
the presence of the camera, composition is casual—a mark of an authentic con-
nection with groups that are not thoroughly civilized—and the subjects do act,
though usually in ways that work to fix a firm identity as alienated adolescent,
bohemian, or lumpenproletarian.
In meeting the lens with their gazes, and composing themselves before the
camera, the subjects in the quasi-ethnographic strand also relate to fashion pho-
tography, but here turned, if not only to the mundane and unexceptional, to the
exceptional as type. There is an interplay of stereotype and the palpable presence
of an individual, so that the viewer is encouraged to place the individual within
the stereotype but also to perturb the stereotype with the individual. In this way,
these photographs depart from fashion, which holds out the promise of wholly
individual expression through an assemblage of standard elements, and does so
through the presentation of exceptionally beautiful people and settings. Fashion
photography wages a paradoxical struggle against the destruction of aura (in
Walter Benjamin’s sense of a unique weave of time and space) that the widespread

4. This series, Trust, shows people captured by other spectacles: in video arcades or at soccer
matches; with eyes closed in prayer; or while receiving beauty and medical treatments. See Adam
Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Trust (London: Westzone, 2000).
5. A recent exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery explored this lineage in European photography;
see Kate Bush and Mark Sladen, eds., In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century
(London: Black Dog, 2006).
74 OCTOBER

distribution of its standard products manufactures, striving within the conven-

tions of its craft to entrance the viewer with a palpable sense of a singular person
with whom they can identify.6
Of these new ethnographic photographers, one of the most successful and
purist is Rineke Dijkstra. Her best-known series of pictures show youths standing
against natural backgrounds—beach, forest, and heath. They are straightforward
pictures that reveal little overt intervention or even composition, but rather present
the human subject in a standardized frame. Dijkstra uses a four-by-five-inch camera
that yields fine detail and rich, subtle color in large-scale prints (edition sizes vary,
but the museum prints are about five feet high). The camera is positioned quite low,
around waist level, dropping the horizon line and lending the figures greater
stature. She uses tripod-mounted fill-in flash, a fashion technique that softens shad-
ows and makes the figures appear a little cut out from their sunlit backgrounds.
The conventional way to see Dijkstra and others like her is through an artis-
tic lineage that runs through August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Thomas
Ruff. This is a tradition that has its roots in a project of radical ethnography
turned on a previously (and soon to be once more) colonizing nation.7 Yet the
mode within which Dijkstra works may be associated with a variety of other inter-
ests and histories drawn from other areas of photography.
Another line, one closer to fashion and magazine work, and which Dijkstra
suggests herself, comprises Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon (we
will return to this shortly).8 Another is to see a kinship with documentary style,
with the rhetorical means by which photography signals its own objectivity, partic-
ularly in the head-on views and obsession with clarity in the work of Walker Evans
(with Evans’s insistence, for example, that the fleas on the Burroughs’s bedsheet
be visible in the printing of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [1941]).9 Yet the work
may also be associated with more expressive and monumentalizing combinations
of image and text from the same period, including the work of Margaret Bourke-
White and Erskine Caldwell, and Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor.10
These various affiliations point in very different directions. An affinity with
documentary style would take readings toward the production of visual knowledge

6. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, ed.
Michael Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 518.
7. August Sander, Citizens of the Twentieth Century: Portrait Photographs, 1892–1952, ed. Gunther
Sander, trans. Linda Keller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).
8. Jessica Morgan, “Interview,” in Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits, exh. cat. (Boston: The Institute of
Contemporary Art; Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), p. 74. See also Urs Stahel, “Afterwards,” in
Rineke Dijkstra, Portraits (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2005), p. 147.
9. See Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995),
p. 182; and James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1941).
10. See Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Viking
Press, 1937); and Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New
York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939).
What’s in a Face? 75

(the idea that photographs, particularly when combined with text, can yield social
knowledge—a view that during the Depression reached a highly self-aware height
in the collaboration between James Agee and Evans); the art strand moves gener-
ally in the direction of undermining the previous view, which in postmodernism
became as much a convention as the naïve belief that the camera cannot lie; and
an association with the fashion lineage, by contrast, may push our interest in
Dijkstra, and others like her, toward thinking about the current art-fashion
crossover “madness” (to use Wolfgang Tillmans’s word), and to thinking about
youth as image and subject in contemporary art and about the cross-branding and
marketing opportunities presented by such work.11
Yet there is another aspect to that last line that is not so simple. It enables us
to get a fix on the variables that art photographers have used to capture their sub-
jects, and it opens up some surprisingly self-critical or at least manifest elements
in the relations between photographers and their subjects.
So to the various projects of Dijkstra’s stated tradition: little reminder is
needed of the main components of Arbus’s work—its journalistic origins, her view
of the cruelty of the camera, which some (notably Susan Sontag) took to be Arbus’s
own, and the idea that Arbus was a politely raised Jewish girl on a prolonged tourist
trip to weird-land,12 or in contrast that her suicide proved the authenticity of her
own alienation and thus of some affinity with her subjects.13 The aspect of Arbus’s
work that should be highlighted here is its artistry and lyricism, at least when com-
pared with much of the work by contemporaries that followed. This is not the way
Arbus wanted herself thought of, and she roundly abused photographic composi-
tion.14 It is true that many of her pictures are centered and frontal, and in this sense
apparently free of composition, or as Carol Armstrong subtly notes, free of “framing
that clearly signifies artiness.”15 Yet, given the considerable skill that she shows in
these photographs, particularly in the precise and sophisticated positioning of fig-
ures against backgrounds (look, for example, at Girl in a Shiny Dress, NYC [1967],
or Girl in Circus Costume [1970]), Arbus’s denial of composition should be taken as
a rhetorical pose.16 Varied compositional means are matched to variable subject
matter, the point being that “freaks” can be found as much among the “normal” as
the marginal, or that it is hard to tell where the border lies, and that any subject
could be made strange by the camera, particularly in Arbus’s hands.

11. Wolfgang Tillmans, correspondence with the author, June 18, 2003.
12. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 31–48.
13. For a critical view of the Arbus literature, see Catherine Lord, “What Becomes a Legend Most:
The Short, Sad Career of Diane Arbus,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed.
Richard Bolton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 111–23.
14. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus (London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. 10.
15. Carol Armstrong, “Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference According to Diane Arbus,” October
66 (Fall 1993), p. 32.
16. Arbus gave the game away by declaring of composition “. . . I guess I must know something
about it from doing it a lot and feeling my way into it and into what I like.” Arbus, Diane Arbus, p. 10.
76 OCTOBER

The other projects, specific episodes within wider fashion-oriented practices,

are less unambiguously celebrated in the art world, in part because of the highly
successful commercial careers of their makers. In Penn’s book Worlds in a Small
Room, he photographed a variety of people in temporary studios set up in rented
rooms or in tent-like structures. Penn saw this project as a release from over-elaborate
fashion work, yearning, from the confines of his New York studio, to work in nat-
ural light with simple means and simple people.17 The simple means were a
Rolleiflex six-by-six-centimeter twin-lens reflex camera, natural northern light,
and the arrangement of subjects against a plain backdrop. In these circumstances,
set aside from their usual environment, photographer and photographed commu-
nicate as humans, Penn claimed, and his subjects acquired “a seriousness of
self-presentation that would not have been expected of simple people.” 18 The
range of subjects varies but is always clearly separated from the implied viewer by
virtue of tribal life, alternative lifestyle (hippies and bikers), or class (menial labor-
ers such as charwomen, truck washers, and street photographers are depicted,
displaying the tools and costumes of their labors).
Like Arbus, and again despite the frontality and centeredness of these
images, Penn makes many artistic choices: first and foremost, he selects subjects,
then he groups figures, and finally he decides what distance the subject should be
from the camera. Penn is open about the way he directly manipulates his subjects
by arranging their bodies to build his compositions. In Peru, working with
indigenous people, and lacking a common language, he posed the subjects by
hand, as he puts it, “moving and bending them. Their muscles were resistant, and
the effort it took on my part was considerable.”19 He even published photographs
of the process (taken by Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn) within the book itself.
Avedon also looked to a road project to broaden his portrait of the United
States—up to then built largely from urban celebrities—with pictures from the
interior.20 Avedon traveled “In the American West” in search of his others, again
laborers but also drifters, prisoners, and the inmates of mental hospitals, who dis-
play the marks of their labor—blood, grime, amputations—and the way that
prolonged work had honed and distorted their bodies as tools, before an implied
audience of urban cosmopolitan types. John Rohrbach, the commissioner of this
project for the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, put the matter of this differ-
ence plainly, not even feeling the need to spell out the identity of “them” and “us,”

17. Irving Penn, “Introduction,” in Worlds in a Small Room (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980),
n.p. The book was first published in 1974. It was not the first time Penn had fled fashion for its other:
in 1947 he had left Vogue to travel to Haiti to find some “real women.” See Maria Morris Hambourg,
“Irving Penn’s Nudes, 1949–50,” in Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn’s Nudes, 1949–50, exh. cat. (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art; Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2002), p. 8.
18. Penn, Worlds in a Small Room, n.p.
19. Ibid.
20. According to Laura Wilson, Avedon at Work in the American West (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2003), p. 13.
Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn. Irving Penn at Work with Six Mudmen. New Guinea, 1970. © 1974 by Irving Penn.
78 OCTOBER

by saying that the subjects are “people

whom many of us would prefer to step
quietly around if encountered in life.”21
Avedon, aside from ensuring that
this work received much prominence,
was also an intelligent and self-conscious
practitioner, and his work was made
with an awareness of Arbus and indeed
Sander.22 Again, the means were quite
simple: Avedon used a white-paper back-
drop; he did not, like Penn, insist on
northern light but excluded sunlight
because its accents would direct the
gaze. (We can compare the flat light of
the Bechers and their progeny—and
this is no accidental association, but a
component in the evolution of a mani-
festly objective style.) Another such
mark of objectivity is printing the edges
of the negative to show that the picture
has not been cropped.23 Richard Avedon at work.
Avedon used an eight-by-ten-inch
view camera, which he stood beside, maintaining eye contact with his subjects at
the expense of precise framing. The result is that few shots are quite central, and
some pictures harshly crop their subjects (though these crops look deliberate and
indeed mannered); there is much placing of people in the frame for expressive
effect—the off-kilter results suggesting social and mental instability, marginality,
and alienation (an old and regular photographic technique to suggest unease with
an environment by a disturbance of the expected placement of the subject within
the photographic frame).
As with Penn, Avedon made many compositional and other artistic deci-
sions: the choice of subjects, picked up at rodeos, truck stops, and places of work,
was made on aesthetic grounds. (Thus we are far from Sander with his focus on
the full range of the typical.) It was Avedon’s concern to find “a face that can hold

21. John Rohrbach, “Preface,” in Richard Avedon, In the American West (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2005), n.p. The first edition was published by Harry N. Abrams in 1985.
22. Richard Bolton notes Avedon’s knowledge of his precursors and gives an extraordinary account
of the concerted marketing and press-management campaign that accompanied the exhibition and
publication. See Richard Bolton, “In the American East: Richard Avedon Incorporated,” in The Contest
of Meaning, pp. 261–82.
23. Arbus did this for the majority of her career, printing the edges of her negatives between 1963
and 1969. See Neil Selkirk, “In the Darkroom,” in Diane Arbus: Revelations, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2003), pp. 270–71.
What’s in a Face? 79

Avedon. Bill Curry, Drifter, Interstate 40, Yukon, Oklahoma, 6/16/80. 1980.

a [museum] wall.”24 Then, there is the variable distance of the subject from the
lens and the height of the lens. As Laura Wilson, one of Avedon’s assistants, has
shown in her photographs, he also used reflectors to direct the light.
Like Penn, Avedon instructed his subjects:
I am observing how he moves, reacts, expressions that cross his face so
that, in making the portrait, I can heighten through instruction what he
does naturally, what he is.25

For example, Wilson describes how, when photographing Bill Curry, Avedon had him
remove his jacket and tuck in his shirt “so that the form of his body would show.”26
Further, there was a great deal of micromanagement of the print, the techni-
cal part of this managed by Avedon’s assistants, to darken or lighten particular
features.27 In his foreword to the book, Avedon is open about the result:

24. Wilson, Avedon at Work in the American West, p. 102.

25. Avedon, American West, n.p. (my italics).
26. Wilson, Avedon at Work in the American West, p. 22.
27. Ibid., p. 117.
80 OCTOBER

These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theater, attempt to achieve

an illusion: that everything embodied in the photograph simply hap-
pened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never told
to stand there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end
was not even in the presence of a photographer.28

This is a false science of the other, then, that verbally reveals its techniques, while
in the pictures they remain hidden—and, at the time, the pictures were often dis-
cussed as if they did yield knowledge of the subject.29
All of Dijkstra’s precursors were noted for their simplifications or reductions
of previous conventional practices, even in their commercial work. In his work for
Vogue, Penn banished the palms, antique sofas, columns, and other flotsam that
had clung from traditional portrait photography into the fashion world, instead
showing models against plain backdrops (though using highly elaborate lighting
arrangements).30 Avedon’s portraits posed celebrity subjects against stark white
backgrounds and concentrated on a tonally harsh, wide-angle rendition of phys-
iognomy and the imputed psychology of the pose. Arbus did not crop her prints,
generally used frontal views, and, remarkably, took her hands-off relation to her
images to the extreme of doing no darkroom work to dodge or burn her prints.31
Dijkstra’s affinity with these figures is not fortuitous: like them, she worked
as a commercial photographer and made portraits of celebrities before turning to
high art. Yet, although her acknowledged precursors worked with pared-back
means, we can see that by comparison with them, Dijkstra’s practice is a further
reduced affair. She certainly chooses but does not apparently instruct her
subjects.32 Within each of her series, she takes a standard distance from the sub-
ject, alters the height of the lens a little, and otherwise does not compose. These
pictures do not contain measuring devices, but otherwise approach an ethno-
graphic practice in which the photographer appears to take the modest, largely
technical role of recording variety and uniformity.
Comparing Arbus and Dijkstra, one obvious difference, driven by the shift in
the primary destination of the work from magazine to museum, is the vast
increase in photographic resolution. Arbus used a six-by-six-centimeter camera for
her best-known work; Dijkstra, as we have seen, uses a four-by-five-inch model. In

28. Avedon, American West, n.p.

29. See Bolton, “In the American East,” p. 264.
30. See Ulf Hård af Segerstad, “Irving Penn—Uncompromising Image Builder,” in Irving Penn
Photographs: A Donation in Memory of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, exh. cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet,
1995), p. 35.
31. Selkirk, “In the Darkroom,” p. 273. Dodging and burning are techniques used to manipulate the
light reaching various areas of the print to ensure good detail throughout high-contrast images or to
obscure unwanted elements. Arbus limited herself to altering the overall contrast of her prints by
using different developing solutions.
32. Dijkstra claims: “I hardly give any directions and I demand a concentration that is decisive for
the photographs.” See Mariska van den Berg, “Interview with Rineke Dijkstra,” in Rineke Dijkstra:
Location, exh. cat. (London: The Photographers’ Gallery, 1997), n.p.
Top: Diane Arbus. Girl in a Circus
Costume. 1970. Left: Dijkstra.
Hilton Head Island, S.C., USA,
June 24, 1992. 1992.
82 OCTOBER

addition, there has been considerable improvement in film resolution since the
1960s. The use of the large-format camera, governed by the requirements of the
museum for large-scale visual spectacle, plays a determining role in the formality
and stillness of Dijkstra’s images. Such cameras are best suited to the depiction of
static scenes, and people must pose quietly for them. They can record self-presen-
tation, the composition of the pose, but rarely spontaneous activity.33
While in Dijkstra there is a surrender of composition, overt identification,
and artistic expression, other compensations are on offer. No contemporary prac-
tice that I know of goes all the way toward ethnographic blankness and objectivity
of presentation while presenting subjects that may be presumed to be of similar
status to the assumed audience. With Dijkstra’s works, the glow of soft sunshine
and flash on flesh, the lush color, and very high resolution work against the stan-
dard presentation, the lack of activity and incident, and the relative lack of
exoticism of the subjects.
In a well-known essay, Leo Steinberg argued that avant-garde production is
subject to a continual process of “sacrifice” of the qualities of its precursors, a
“shrinkage” or subtraction, to which the previous generation of artists strongly
objects.34 Now one may say that subtraction and addition coexist, so that in this
strain of photography what is taken away in terms of expression and artistic choice
is compensated for by a great increase in print size, photographic resolution (the
density and apparent seamlessness of the data), and above all color. Another way
of putting it is to say that subjective, creative choice has been subsumed in favor of
greater resolution and bit depth, a measurable increase in the quantity of data.35
The manifest display of very large amounts of data in such images may be
related to a broader trend in contemporary art to exploit the effect of the “data
sublime.” In providing the viewer with the impression and spectacle of a chaoti-
cally complex and immensely large configuration of data, these photographs act
much as renditions of mountain scenes and stormy seas did on nineteenth-century
urban viewers. This can be seen plainly in Thomas Ruff’s series of portraits, made
in contention with Sander’s series. In denying social differentiation while provid-
ing a scale and definition that Sander could only have dreamt of, they overwhelm

33. The lenses needed to cover such large negatives are of a long focal length, and they require
small apertures and thus slow shutter speeds to keep scenes in focus. It will be interesting to see how
far this aspect of contemporary photography is technologically governed, since very high-resolution
digital backs for medium-format cameras are now being made (up to forty megapixels—I know this will
sound quaint in a few years), which offer photographers the opportunity to make view-camera quality
photographs with handheld cameras.
34. Leo Steinberg, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with
Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). The passages on sacrifice are pp. 6–10.
35. Megapixel equivalents of film negatives and positives are a controversial issue. Nevertheless, a
scanned four-by-five-inch negative will give a file size of about 500MB; a six-by-six-centimeter negative
around a tenth of that; then taking account of the greater information in color (24 rather than 16 bit),
we can estimate that a typical Arbus and Dijksta will differ by an order of 2,560. This estimate discounts
the changes to film resolution since the 1960s.
What’s in a Face? 83

Dijkstra. Almerisa, Asylum Center, Leiden,

The Netherlands, March 14, 1994. 1994.

the viewer with an ocean of data that they cannot make sense of. Sander’s work
provided, for one famous interpreter, a social training manual;36 Ruff’s abandons
the viewer in a wilderness of information.37
In this mode, the subjects do not act or interact socially; thus if the attractors
and art-historical references in this practice are fashion, avant-garde objectivity,
and neo-objective art photography, the repulsors include photojournalism and
documentary, in particular the tradition of expressive, committed documentary
exemplified by W. Eugene Smith and more recently Sebastião Salgado. This tradi-
tion is assumed, from the point of view of the art-world sophisticate, to embody
social naïveté and cultural simplicity. The last thing, it seems, that must obtrude
into these novel ethnographic images is a view of their subjects as interacting
social agents.

36. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” p. 520.

37. Of course, this interest in the data sublime is not confined to photography. It is also apparent in
painting ( Julie Mehretu is a prominent example), and particularly in works that draw on digital data,
for example Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway’s Black Shoals: Stock Market Planetarium (2001) and Mark
Hansen and Ben Rubin’s The Listening Post (2002). For the former, see Black Shoals Stock Market
Planetarium: An Art Project by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, exh. cat. (Copenhagen: Copenhagen
Contemporary Art Center, 2004).
84 OCTOBER

Dijkstra. Almerisa, Leidschendam,

The Netherlands, June 25, 2003.
2003.

Yet there is one kind of agency that is permitted: self-presentation before the
camera. Dijkstra has said that part of her interest in the beach series was in the
varied self-expression of youths in Poland and the United States, the latter unsur-
prisingly being more self- and fashion-conscious than the former.38 So a theme of
the photographs is their subjects’ self-presentation, and among those series of
youths before ocean and forest an implicit idea of the process of socialization into
the commercialized image world (and perhaps out of “nature,” just as the figures
are excised from their backgrounds by flash-guns). This theme is made more
explicit in Dijkstra’s series that track human variation across time rather than
space, as in Almerisa, presenting an exiled child who is photographed over the
span of nine years growing into the garb and body language of her adopted culture.
Such images produce a double effect: of identification between viewer and
subject through the apparent visual presence of a person, and distancing through
their deadpan quasi-ethnographic photographic means. Distancing is also inherent
in the silencing and stilling power of photography itself, exacerbated in the large,

38. Morgan, “Interview,” p. 80.

What’s in a Face? 85

high-definition prints that produce an illusion of presence to set against that

silence. Yet stilling and silencing, especially in such detailed prints devoid of action,
focus the attention on the visual fact of the subject’s passive body, in all its particu-
larities and peculiarities. The basis of identification with a photographed subject,
as Martha Rosler has pointed out, is a “physiognomic fallacy,” in which the face
and body is seen as an expression of character.39 This is what links ethnographic
photography and the basic instinct of fashion, for, in both, constitutional vices
and virtue, character, abilities—a person’s very being—are written on the skin.
What kind of identification is had here? It may be useful to make a compari-
son with Benjamin’s writing about the one moment of photography that he
thought produced auratic images, because it confronted the viewer with a distinct
presence. Benjamin argued that early photographs of bourgeois males exhibited
aura because of the coming together of a variety of congruent technical and social
factors. The reserve of bourgeois sitters, linked to their innocence before the cam-
era, at a time when photography and everyday life were still unconnected by the
press, was matched by the large but uneven tonal range of the medium, which left
much in obscure shadow. The techniques that replaced such early efforts would
rudely illumine everything. In addition, the long exposures required to render the
images encouraged the subjects to reflect on their lives, as did the quiet circum-
stances in which they were photographed (David Octavius Hill, Benjamin notes,
made his portraits in a graveyard to lessen the chance of interruption).40 The pho-
tographer was a representative of the most advanced technical means of the time
who confronted in his sitters representatives of a confident, historically rising
class.41 The result, Benjamin claimed, was “a medium that lent fullness and secu-
rity to their gaze even as it penetrated that medium.”42
Aside from the use of the view camera, which ensures a formality of depic-
tion, and (given the rarity of these cameras now) makes of the photographic
session a novelty and may impart to the subject time to compose themselves and
reflect, the conditions in which Dijkstra and those like her operate are very nearly
the opposite of what Benjamin described. As with much fashion work, total revela-
tion is strived for here: flash banishing deep shadow, and the fine-grained film
and large negatives ensuring that all detail is rendered minutely. While the partic-
ular circumstances of this photography are novel to its subjects, none of them are
remotely innocent of photography’s effects, for they have been saturated in them
since birth. Above all, the confrontation here is between marginalized offshoots of
the multibillion-dollar photographic industry: the artist, who occupies a niche
market in part by the combination of modern technology and old-fashioned

39. Martha Rosler, “Post-Documentary, Post-Photography?,” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected

Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), p. 221.
40. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” p. 512.
41. Ibid., p. 517.
42. Ibid., pp. 516 –17.
86 OCTOBER

means, with those subjects who (far from being the confident, mature representa-
tives of a rising class) are half-formed adolescents of no professional status, or are
emerging shaken from the bullring, the firing range, or the obstetricians’ ward,
or are in the process of transforming their identities—those, in other words, who
have uncertain control over their reserve.
Dijkstra writes:
For me it is essential to understand that everyone is alone. Not in the
sense of loneliness, but rather in the sense that no one can completely
understand someone else. I know very well what Diane Arbus means
when she says that one cannot crawl into someone else’s skin, but there
is always an urge to do so anyway. I want to awaken definite sympathies
for the person I have photographed.43

In her statements, Dijkstra repeatedly stresses the solitary character of her sub-
jects and says that she wants to get at the essential, human aspect of them.44 By
apparently stripping away the social, in focusing on circumstances where its hold
seems shakiest, she seeks to reveal the essentially human. In this, Dijkstra is indeed
close to the ambitions of Penn and Avedon.
The identification between subject and viewer takes place at the level of the
image, and in a visual engagement with an isolated subject: it is not dialogic, com-
municative, or developmental, but instantaneous and apparently instinctive.45 If
the poses seem familiar, it is because capitalist subjects are schooled in uniform
disciplines of self-presentation; if they seem redolent, too, of episodes in art his-
tory, that is because advertisers and marketers continually ransack a wide range of
visual culture to borrow its allure for their products.46
Along with the process of simultaneous identification and distancing, the
use of fashion techniques to depict ordinary folk produces a double effect of cele-
bration and critique. The critique is itself doubled, for the ordinary is rendered
strange by such attention, as if these people, in departing from the standards of

43. Cited in Andy Grunberg, “Out of the Blue: The Photographs of Rineke Dijkstra,” Artforum 36,
no. 9 (May 1997), p. 87. Statement originally published in the catalog to the Frankfurter Kunstverein’s
1996 installment of its “Prospect” series.
44. For loneliness, see Mariska van den Berg’s interview with the artist. Dijkstra says in an interview
with David Brittain that she is searching for the “essential” in her subjects. See Creative Camera, no. 357
(April–May 1999), pp. 20–27.
45. In some images by Dijkstra, more than one figure appears, yet the engagement of the each fig-
ure is with the camera, not with their companion in the frame.
46. This is why the juxtaposition of Dijkstra and Cézanne bathers, seen at MoMA as part of a general
museum effort to link contemporary photography with painting (rather than earlier photography), is
less interesting than it may at first appear: certainly, self-conscious photographers search for agreeable
art-historical parallels when making their work, knowing that it will ease the interpretative life of cura-
tors; certainly, too, their subjects may take on poses reminiscent of Botticelli or Cézanne mediated by a
thousand advertisements; but to posit such resemblances on broader humanist or art-historical grounds
would require further proof. A more radical juxtaposition would also include the advertisements.
What’s in a Face? 87

capitalist beauty, were deformed, and, through that deformation, the techniques
that produce this standard beauty are held up to questioning. So there is a simul-
taneous elevation and lowering of the subjects, and this effect is dependent on
the blankness of the form of presentation. (This can be readily seen by comparing
Dijkstra’s work with that of Sally Mann or Jock Sturges, where manifest artistry and
lyricism lead to elevation alone.)47 So, if there is a radical moment in this mode of
photography, it is in the possibility of self-recognition of one’s own flaws and the
effort to conform to the standardized image world, as in catching a glimpse of
oneself in a fashion-store mirror, surrounded and denigrated by the icons of capi-
talist beauty.
The novelty of this photography is that in the past, such ethnographic
means were turned on those viewed as definitively other, and when there was
uncertainty about the otherness of the subject (as in Arbus) the addition of an
expressive and individualistic style leavened the results. Now there appears a com-
bination of deadpan ethnographic method applied to subjects who are not
definitively marked off from the viewer, and it is often the instability of identity
that is fixed upon. While such photography may offer a critique of the classifying
impulse that lay behind imperial ethnographic photography at home and abroad,
it is not one that impedes the guilty pleasure of viewing these contemporary sub-
jects as mere image.
There is a break, too, with the old, discreditable notion that primitives,
women, and the lower classes had a greater and more immediate affinity with
their bodies, on which was seen written their true character. Not that in this new
work everyone appears as rational, active social beings, but the association applies
more broadly to everyone as consumers and fashion victims, creatures of the
image world. Thus the focus is on the young, especially adolescents, against whom
those forces are deployed most fiercely and with the most tragic—and simultane-
ously most comic—effects.
This extension of those subjects who have become passive reflectors of spec-
tacle is linked to the difficultly of knowing in neoliberal society who is really the
other—due to social hybridity and fluidity, immigration, emigration, miscegena-
tion, and continual social upheaval. The effect is exacerbated by the generalized
exoticization of a multitude of fleeting micro-identities brought about by spectac-
ular commerce. Such photography brings about a largely postclass, postsocial
movement’s sublime enjoyment of the mundane mass as exotica. It highlights an
instability of identity, congruent with the micro-identities of consumerism, which
the art world generally recommends. It does so, not necessarily to produce a
greater identification with these non-others, but a realization that we are all (as
images) irreducibly alien, contingent, and particular. Indeed, that as images, we

47. See, for example, Sally Mann, Immediate Family (New York: Aperture, 1992); and Jock Sturges,
The Last Day of Summer (New York: Aperture, 1991).
88 OCTOBER

participate, willingly or not, in the chain that ties people’s appearances to ex-
change value.
This constitutes the terrible plausibility of these images, and part of the basis
for their success: they do describe and also enact a world in which people are
socially atomized, politically weak, and are governed by their place in the image
world. In demanding that the maximum visual detail be wrung from their subjects,
they silence and still them. In their seamless, high-resolution depictions, they pre-
sent the victory of the image world over its human subjects as total and eternal.
While the results may hold apparently radical elements—that the passivity
and image victimhood of the subjects may rebound on their viewers—the ambigu-
ity of such images finally salvages artist and viewer. Such images oscillate between
identification and distancing, honoring and belittling, critical recognition and
the enjoyment of spectacle, and access to the real and the critique of realist repre-
sentation. Despite the vast amount of data in these images, their specificity is low
in terms of unambiguous statements about their subjects. Given that lack of speci-
ficity, so standard a feature of art-world production, what is highlighted instead
(as Rosler has argued) is self-projection by the photographer, and, we should add,
by the viewer.48 Dijkstra says that the bathers in the beach pictures are “more or
less a self-portrait.”49 So we find ourselves in that familiar realm of thorough ambi-
guity, complex as a trap for thought, though far from complex, indeed clichéd, as
a configuration in art production, in which, in the free-trade zone of the art work,
artist, and viewer are offered matching opportunities for the apparently non-
instrumental play of their creative and intellectual faculties.50
Historically, this is a strange result. The legacy of the prosaic photographic
series is, after all, bound to conceptualism and a critique of conventional notions
of artistic subjectivity, originality, and creativity. Here it implicitly produces its
opposite: a standard and immediately recognizable form of distinction, in which a
dose of art-historical conceptualism helps elevate straight photography to the
realm of charismatic, individualized art.
In thinking about the role of this art in a globalized, neoliberal climate, we
come back to the puzzle of the success of such images. Why are the subjects of
contemporary art so often taken as merely spectacular fragments rather than as
active persons, while the opposite is assumed of its makers and viewers? Even in
the apparently opposing participant-observer mode, there is little stress on agency
(other than entertaining misbehavior) but rather on passive conditions that are
meant to constitute assured identities. In both, the excluded middle is agency and
its depiction in documentary, along with the construction of a realist structure

48. Rosler, “Post-Documentary, Post-Photography?,” p. 226.

49. Morgan, “Interview,” p. 79.
50. I make a more general argument about the character of the art work as such a zone between the
worlds of work and mass culture, and the threats that confront this system, in my book Art Incorporated
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
What’s in a Face? 89

through the combination of differentiated images, and particularly the idea that
identity might be transformed through agency.51
The plausibility of the ethnographic strand of photographic imagery surely
derives from the accuracy of its implicit view of neoliberal societies. The push and
pull of identification and distancing, and honoring and belittling, are staged only
at the level of the image, not in seeing its subjects as agents. In this sense, such
images exhibit a transparent complicity with commercialized spectacle. There is a
link, in other words, between the presentation of these subjects as mere image
and the familiar powerlessness of people in day-to-day democracy, of image and
news management, of the hollowing out of citizenship in favor of consumerism, of
broadcast and celebrity culture. This strand’s relentless focus on the fixed image is
a reflection of the marked decline in political agency, in democratic participation,
which is a steadily growing and universal feature of neoliberal societies.52 A deep
distrust of an excess of democratic activism (the derogatory term is “populism”)
has been a common feature of neoliberal regimes, and is indeed an element of
its foundational theory from Hayek onward.53 The mediating and causal link
between the realms of politics and art is primarily the museum, increasingly a
branded and business-led entity, devoted to gallery spectacle, of which large pho-
tographic prints, alluring and accessible, have become a central feature.
Yet, in the vision implied in such photographs, all is not lost in surrender
before the image world. In the panoply of exoticized similitude, a true other holds
itself apart. Through the act of depiction, the artist becomes the other of the
image-bound subjects, simultaneously creating each side of this opposed pair.
Avedon, who it will be remembered made an Autobiography that consisted of por-
traits of other people, says this about the relation:54
A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete
his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be dis-
covered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot pos-
sibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions
for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my
need to plead mine, but the control is with me.55

51. In the ethnographic model, identity is uncertain but agency is denied; in the participant-observer
model, agency is permitted insofar as it confirms identity as fixed. Broadly, this is, of course, the think-
ing attacked in much of Badiou’s work. See, for example, Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the
Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001).
52. For a fine account of the range of the decline in political activity across capitalist democracies,
see Peter Mair, “Ruling the Void? The Hollowing of Western Democracy,” New Left Review 42
(Nov.–Dec. 2006), pp. 25–51.
53. David Harvey, in his recent history of neoliberalism, notes that it recommends that people
should be free to make choices, as long as they do not choose strong forms of collective organization.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 69.
54. Richard Avedon, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1993).
55. Avedon, American West, n.p.
90 OCTOBER

The artist retains agency, as does the viewer, a double of the artist, who freely
reflects on the artist’s products. Hal Foster has argued that even critical ethno-
graphic projects can stray “from collaboration to self-fashioning, from a decentering
of the artist as cultural authority to a remaking of the other in neo-primitivist
guise.”56 This tendency to stray is less a fault of individual artists, less a matter of
their lack of rigor or of insufficient safeguards established in particular projects,
and more a structural matter. The awareness of the effects of the image world over
its subjects separates artists and their viewers, a cultural elite, from those who
worry too much about the light that they reflect into lenses. The terror that is
here safely distanced by the sublime is that of unthinking immersion in the image
world and the mass. In this way, class is after all written deep in these apparently
postclass images. They bear the mark of fundamental deficiencies in democracy,
that permit the general population to be plausibly viewed through an ethno-
graphic lens, and above all the disregard of democracy that lies at the heart of
neoliberalism—as much in Blair’s consorting with Berlusconi as in Thatcher’s
with Pinochet, and of successive U.S. governments in their manufacture and main-
tenance of convenient tyrannies.

56. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 196–97.