Given the myriad forms of photographic practice available to us, each with multiple styles and expectations, it seems a contradiction – if not a surprising one – to say that some genres are actually quite rigid in the particular approach or quality we require of them. I’m thinking specifically of portraiture – the facile assumptions of legibility are time and again to the fore, where the picture is thought to show a “likeness” or reveal something about its subject, an easy correspondence between disparate surfaces.
To complicate that is not just to call the photographic enterprise into question, but our perceptual expectations as well. They in turn depend on the world being as it appears, with nothing at all behind the veil – or else everything, where a subject performs its absence. The portraiture of Lydia Anne McCarthy subtly locates itself somewhere within these extremes, verging sometimes on abstraction, but never quite allowing it. She deals, in fact, with the complex embodiment of vision.
These works were made by replacing the conventional lens of a view camera with a Fresnel screen, but that is in many ways incidental to their significance. Even if we know the particular kind of optical device used to produce the images, its effect is not so much material as it is in the altered character of our visual experience, which is counter to any expectation we might have of a photographic portrait. What she is dealing with then, is not a likeness of the person, not the photographic performance of their visible identity – their character – but the act of their becoming visible to the camera, the space that they occupy at the moment the picture is being made – these are, in fact, portraits of that space.
What she proposes is an activated visual experience, but it is not one where her sitters are incidental either. Theirs is the realisation of a double embodiment, first as an individual and again as a perceived subject; McCarthy articulates the distinction between those two roles as being within the photographic process itself.
See the rest of this series here and be sure to also have a look at this series, Shadows and Reflections.
