Portraiture as World Picturing

The concept of portraiture has long presumed that the practice of capturing the appearance of a person—or, by metaphorical extension, a thing, place, or period—can effectively fix the subject’s identity, suspend it in that form, for that place and time, at least, and hold it there, like that, for future contemplation. In contemporary conditions, by contrast, multiplicity prevails, subjectivity is decentered, and identities are contested and fluid. This occurs within a political economy of images, an iconomy of world pictures, that seems chaotic on its spectacular surfaces and inchoate in its depths. Which new kinds of portraiture have appeared in these contexts, which old ones have persisted or transfigured? For corporations, states and other institutions, portraiture becomes a practice of profiling the flows, thus AI generates visual glossalia by scanning the Internet for anything resembling the search inquiry (including inquiries about portraiture). The powerful continue to consolidate their power by presenting themselves as iconic. A mugshot becomes a rallying cry and a fundraising meme. Meanwhile, Indigenous artists repurpose the tropes used during the colonization of their peoples, turning them into declarations of defiant survival and claims for sovereignty. Other artists explore large scale changes in the iconomy and the resulting implications for selfhood, citizenship, and world being today. Some ask whether subjectivity can be projected without using the imagery of appearance, in the absence of portraiture as a category.

Using such examples, this paper will examine the stakes of, and for, practices of portraiture within contemporary world picturing.