Portrait Photography and Appropriation

Year 2023, Volume: 2 Issue: 1, 18 - 32, 31.03.2023

Murat Han Er

Abstract

In the early years of photography, portrait photography has produced quite a lot of different art and style, from the self-portrait of Robert Cornelius (1839) to the 'Self-portrait as a drowned man' (1840) photograph by Hippolyte Bayard, from the pictorial portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron to the present day handled by the artist in different ways. Portrait approaches that go back and forth between reality and fiction have turned into a completely different structure with the Postmodern period. With the postmodern period, a stance was determined in which different understandings were exhibited against modernism by moving away from the existing modernist norms. One of the distinctive understandings of art observed in the postmodern period is Appropriation. This approach manifests itself as an understanding of re-presenting an image by owning it.

Appropriation portrait approach, on the other hand, contains neither Cameron's aesthetic and pictorial understanding nor the concern of capturing the character; Nadar who is trying to capture in the portrait. Appropriation portraits are produced with an understanding that is quite different in the history of photography and far from traditional portrait rules. Appropriation portraits have created images by centered on "reproduction", as the Postmodern destroys originality and is fed by different styles and contradictions. Richard Prince's reproduction of the 'Cowboys' in Marlboro advertisements, Sherrie Levine's re-photographing of modernist photography classics such as Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Alexander Rodtchenko without any changes, Cindy Sherman's frames from films in the Untitled Film Still series as models and even Aneta Grzeszykowska's reproduction of the Untitled Film Still series reproduced by Cindy Sherman are among the significant examples. In this study, 'Appropriation' portraits were examined by considering the portrait approaches created in the context of the new understanding.

Keywords

Photography, Appropriation, Portrait

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