| This dissertation analyses three types of photographic portraits as exemplified by Thomas Ruffs Portraits (1985-1990), Nancy Burson's Digital Composite Portraits (1980-1990) and Gary Schneider's Genetic Self-portrait (1997-1999). The methodology is based on structural analysis of portraiture and the pragmatics of images. The author conceives portraiture as a mediation of individual identity in which the medium and the figure define the individual at a given period. Distinctions are made between identification and diagnostic purposes. But in the use of portrait, both can hardly be dissociated, since the face enables one to identify an individual as well as to determine his character, following the physiognomic tradition. The selection of examples is based on portrait parameters, the medium including analog and digital photographs, and the figure showing the face or genetic identifiers. This choice makes possible the analysis of the performativity of digital imagery, and of genetic iconography in reshaping identity at the end of the twentieth-century. According to pragmatics, the author sustains that the selected works of art refer to the history of the identity portrait, from anthropological and psychiatric typologies to "signaletic notice" designed by Alphonse Bertillon at the Identification Bureau of the Paris Prefecture of Police in 1880s. The ID portrait illustrates a paradigm that reappears also in digital printing and genetic profiling. Furthermore, this ID paradigm presupposes objective recording of individual body signs which are unfalsifiable. The author supports the thesis that three types of contemporary portraits achieve respectively stylisation, subversion, and radicalisation of the ID paradigm principles. Ruffs Portraits exaggerates the ID card style, and doing so, it emphasises the enunciation instead of the statement of identity. Burson's Composites use digital pictures of the face in imitation of Francis Galton's nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific method of classifying individuals, and destabilises fixed facial identity. Schneider's Genetic Self-portrait pushes the logic of bodily identification by replacing the face with genetic attributes such as the chromosomes. Maintaining the biological discourse on identity, the latter "portrait without-face" offers associative and narrative possibilities that the classical portrait does not possess. The author suggests that these three different, but synchronic, positions concerning the ID paradigm exercise a criticism of modernity; that is, from a foucaldian point of view, an hermeneutic of the self. In conclusion, the hypotheses are examined from Jean-Francois Lyotard's theory on postmodern art.; Key words: Nineteenth and twentieth centuries, photography, portraiture, identity, mediation. |
