FACE TIME

A Series of Three Lectures

given by

Colin Westerbeck

on

The History of Portrait Photography

WHEN: Saturday, January 27, 11a. – 12 noon Saturday, February 3, 11a. – 12 noon Saturday, February 10, 11a. – 12 noon WHERE: Los Angeles Center of Photography 1515 Wilcox Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90028 Before moving to Los Angeles, Colin Westerbeck was a Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1986 through 2003. Since then he has written a weekly column on photography for the Los Angeles Times in 2006 and 2007 and has contributed frequently to Art in America. He has also taught photographic history on the under-graduate and graduate levels at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California. From 2008 until 2012, he was the Director of the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent books are Chuck Close: Photographer (Prestel, 2014), A Democracy of Imagery (Steidl, 2016), and a completely revised and up-dated edition of his 1994 book co-authored by Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander, A History of Street Photography, published by Laurence King, October 2017. In 2018, Harper Collins will publish his Vivian Maier: The 35-Millimete Color Photography. The three lectures for LACP on the history of portrait photography are . . .

2

MORSE'S CODE; OR, How the Daguerreotype Both Exceeded & Disappointed

American Expectations When the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse, met Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre in Paris, Morse was so impressed with the daguerreotype that he took lessons in it and was one of the first Americans to open a daguerrean studio. Because America was far less advanced in the fine arts, including portraiture, the daguerreotype became a much greater success here than it ever was in France, where Charles Baudelaire denounced it as a vulgarity suited only to petit bourgeois taste. Even in America, the case in which daguerreotypes came turned out to be a Pandora’s Box when opened.

!"

Samuel J. Miller, Frederick Douglass, 1847/1852, whole-plate daguerreotype

3

MIRROR, ЯOЯЯIM

The Self-Portrait in Photography From Surrealism to the selfie, photographers have used the self-portrait to reflect every state of mind from self-aggrandizement to their worst nightmare. It is photography’s answer to the Rorschach Card. It’s also the most psychological form of photography, and the one in which women ranging from Claude Cahun to Cindy Sherman have excelled.

❖ ☞ ❖

Claude Cahun, I. O. U. (Self- John F. Collins, Self-Portrait in Pride), 1929/30 Frame-in-Frame, 1935

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #56, 1980

4

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN

RICHARD AVEDON, IRVING PENN & THE PORTRAITURE OF THE COLD WAR

The two predominant American portrait photographers of the late 20th century were Avedon and Penn. Each radically altered the aesthetic of celebrity portraiture established by pre-war predecessors ranging from Cecil Beaton to Edward Steichen. Although the styles invented by the two post-war pros were dialectically different, each in his own way brought the rich, powerful or glamorous public figures they photographed down to earth.

! "

Richard Avedon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jasper Johns, New York, November 18, former President of the United States, 1983 Palm Springs, January 31, 1964