face-puller

em que, neste contexto de Allen Sapp e quem sabe em outros, o retrato é a biografia, o auto-retrato a auto-biografia.

--
portrait in parts

Allen Sapp painted a lot of pictures and like any storyteller; he reiterates the same scene and the same subject again and again. As viewers become familiar with his works, the accumulation slowly comes together, layer upon layer, one scene returning in another painting or identical subjects with different emphases. Together the individual paintings gradually register as continuous elements. Each painting and each portrait becomes one part of an ongoing and increasingly immersive diorama. In this sense, the individual canvases can be understood together as a single portrait in parts. Individually they provide small descriptions and oblique references to particular people and the things they do. As the individual paintings come to be known, the layers are added to a rich and deepening picture of the artist’s community – as he experienced it.
Specific people the artist knew are remembered as parts of a whole. The portrayal of each individual is subsumed by the emergence of a larger, overarching description of the people: the artist’s people. Because the subjects are construed from memory, their particular presence on canvas, however roughly or finely rendered, is directly related to the role they played in the formation of the artist’s psyche.

do catálogo.


face-pulling
“Face-puller” was a name given to the camera for its cool ability to ‘take’ a mechanically perfect likeness from its subject. When used by ethnographers, soldiers and entrepreneurs, cameras were often viewed with suspicion by Aboriginal subjects. Rooted in overwhelmingly lopsided power relations, their misgivings had more to do with their inability to contribute to or control the meanings of their images and the uses to which they would be put than any misunderstandings around new technology. Compared to a drawing or painting, the mechanically (or digitally) produced image is virtually instantaneous. It is surgical in precision and cuts through the ongoing flow of the world to fix and stop it for posterity. Many writers have remarked on the peculiar character of the photograph as a mechanically frozen moment of time that anticipates death. The photographic image only requires light and the correct adjustment of its mechanism to render. The subjectivities and lived relations between photographer and subject are irrelevant to its technical proficiency. For this reason photography was used early on by police forces and scientists as a
colonizing tool for gathering empirical (and incriminating) evidence. It was free from the subjective distortions of painting and the untrustworthiness of memory.

diria até um contrário: it was free from the objective distortions of painting and the trustworthiness of memory. ou ainda, it was not free from--