This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
”Icons: Selections from The Portrait Unbound, Photography by Robert Weingarten” at The Breman Museum through Oct. 1 presents a selection of 14 large-scale, digitally captured images. Each is a manipulated and printed color photographic portrait of a celebrity or noted cultural figure and each explores provocative issues, not least of which is the very idea of portraiture itself.
Credit: Charles E. Davis III
Credit: Charles E. Davis III
Weingarten began the project with a question: Can you express a person photographically without showing them?
Deploying the technique of the translucent composite developed in his earlier “Pentimento” series, Weingarten’s “portraits” represent a diverse group of historical figures and personalities, from Hank Aaron and Stephen Sondheim to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, recording artist and producer Quincy Jones and restaurateur Alice Waters.
But here’s the catch: they don’t include any physical likeness of the subject, instead representing them biographically through photographs of images and objects that the subjects have suggested might best represent them.
After painstakingly capturing these images digitally, the artist meticulously composes a collage in photoshop. The resulting digitally-constructed and printed mashups push the traditional photographic portrait into unexpected areas and introduce sometimes surprising associations.
Credit: Courtesy of Lumiere gallery
Credit: Courtesy of Lumiere gallery
The exhibit opens, however, with “Warsaw, 1943″ (2011), an image from “Pentimento.” For that series, Weingarten took pictures of historic places such as Guernica, Havana and Manzanar that, he has said, often don’t bear the traces of their tragic histories. He then digitally superimposes other images, creating what he calls a translucent composite.
“Warsaw, 1943″ blends Weingarten’s own photograph of the city with archival images of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the Nazi ghettos during the Holocaust. The ghostly overlay and interplay of the archival images of Nazi soldiers and Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto with the contemporary photograph of the Warsaw cityscape create an eerie, ambiguous spatiotemporal reality -- the city visually haunted by its dark past.
The series’ title, “Pentimento,” is a painting term which means the presence or emergence of earlier images from marks that have been painted over, suggesting not only Weingarten’s long held interest in exploring photography’s relation to other techniques of image-making but his re-affirmation of the power of photographic memory, made possible by his embrace of advanced digital editing and photoshop techniques.
The portraits in the Icons exhibit carry this exploration of photographic memory in a new direction.
Credit: Courtesy of Lumiere gallery
Credit: Courtesy of Lumiere gallery
Weingarten’s portrait of “Hank Aaron” (2009), for example, includes images of the baseball player’s iconic number 44 jersey, a shot of Turner Field, an image of a jersey from the Indianapolis Clowns (the team Aaron played for in the Negro American League, as it was then known), and text of Aaron’s words from the Chasing the Dream Foundation.
The upper right corner of the photograph contains an image of the B&O train car that Aaron was forced to sleep on when traveling with his Milwaukee Braves teammates during segregation. Once again Weingarten’s translucent composite brings to the surface forgotten or suppressed histories.
His portrait of the American painter “Chuck Close” (2007), a portraitist himself who drew extensively and provocatively from photography, incorporates an image of Close’s portrait of composer Philip Glass, shots of Giotto’s lovely blue frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy (one of Close’s favorite rooms), and a superimposed image in the chapel window of The White Garden from Sissinghurst Castle, in Kent, England, one of the artist’s most cherished places. It’s a striking composition that offers as much insight into the artist as any traditional portrait might.
The reproduction of Willem de Kooning’s iconic “Woman” painting (1950-52) in the right-hand corner of the Close “portrait” — a painting often offered as evidence of de Kooning’s misogyny — perhaps unintentionally suggests yet another layer of meaning, given the allegations of Close’s odious behavior toward women in the final years of his life.
Credit: Editions of 10
Credit: Editions of 10
Perhaps the most striking portrait is that of renegade actor and director “Dennis Hopper” (2006). Hopper’s own famous “Double Standard” (1961), a snapshot taken from behind the wheel of a car of two adjacent Standard gas stations, rests behind an image of Hopper’s iconic chopper from his countercultural 1969 road film Easy Rider.
The other side of the picture is dominated by an image of Warhol’s silkscreen portrait of Chairman Mao. An avid collector, Hopper owned the Mao portrait and notoriously, in a paranoid drug-induced craze, fired at it twice with a shotgun, first a warning shot and then a shot through the communist revolutionary’s left eye. The damage to the canvas remains, along with the annotations Hopper’s friend Andy Warhol made to the canvas, scrawling “warning shot” and “bullet hole” on the surface of the canvas, with a circle drawn around the wounded eye.
Credit: Courtesy of the Breman Museum
Credit: Courtesy of the Breman Museum
Digitally captured, composed and printed, the selection of portraits in this Breman exhibit not only pop with color but offer a captivating and thought-provoking exploration of photographic portraiture.
The museum is organizing several events to complement the exhibit, among them a concert-cabaret program, “Strictly Sondheim,” to be performed by the Atlanta Gay Men’s Chorus and the Atlanta Women’s Chorus on May 21, and a panel on July 16 with choreographer John Heginbotham, who has collaborated with Mikhail Baryshnikov (one of Weingarten’s subjects). John Welker, director of Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, will moderate.
IF YOU GO
“Icons: Selections from The Portrait Unbound, Photography by Robert Weingarten”
Through Oct. 1. $4-$12. The Breman Museum, 1440 Spring St. N.W., Atlanta. 678-222-3700, thebreman.org.
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Robert Stalker is an Atlanta-based freelance writer who covers modern and contemporary art.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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