great photographic portraits #4



Andy Warhol never let his mask slip. He played the role of deadpan idiot-savant to perfection. "My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person", he said, and his own portrait of Blondie singer Debbie Harry is just that. But, as with many of his disarmingly simple observations, there is a wider truth behind it. We are fascinated by fame, by the physical appearance of those who stand apart from the common herd, and by the extra insight that the raw 'honesty' of a photograph gives us.

I was struck a while ago by a photograph of Chopin in which he stares sullenly at the photographer. He's wearing a heavy overcoat and seems almost to have been caught off-guard, although he is posing for the camera. It told me something fundamental about the man that I couldn't discern in the - inevitably romanticised - sketches and paintings of Chopin I'd seen before. He looks more masculine, more human, and now when I think of Chopin I visualise the photographic image rather than the artists' impressions. Same with Liszt (the late photographs where he looks so priest-like), or the photographs of Baudelaire - a dark-eyed, middle-aged, fading dandy - looking somehow vulnerable and proud at the same time. I'll try to post these examples here sometime.

Meanwhile, I chose this image by Warhol - a man not known primarily as a photographer - to illustrate the point that knowing something about the subject of a photograph adds an extra dimension to it, makes it more intriguing and compelling. Of course I could have chosen a more 'arty' celebrity portrait from that period by a celebrity photographer like Annie Liebovitz, but I like Warhol's simple, straightforward style better. He doesn't allow his own persona to intrude, and he isn't trying to impress us with his abilities as a photographer. And, well, it's actually a lovely portrait; unassuming, sexy, and with that deceptively vacant expression in the eyes that mirrors the man behind the camera.