The Enraptured Face
Marco Anelli, from the series ‘In Your Eyes’, documentation of Marina Abramović‘s, ‘The Artist Is Present’ MoMA, New York, 2010
“A symbolic substitute is required in order to externalize the imagined controlling gaze of the ‘big Other’: this job could be performed by an enraptured face carrying within it the idea of a space extending endlessly inwards, with which one could briefly commune. Just briefly – any longer would be unbearable.”
This is an excerpt from a really great article published by frieze magazine about modern portrait photography and the idea of the “enraptured face.” In it the author discusses the portrait work of distinctly different photographers, from Thomas Struth (“instead of pointing to inwardness, the face becomes a stylistic fetish to accompany a subtle, critically distant way of seeing”) to Aura Rosenberg (“[this] series prompts less of a curiosity about the individuals depicted than an interest in the eroticism of photography itself – the wish, here taken to absurd lengths, to partake of intensity and to affect the sitters at a remove”). View the full article here.
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