EVERYONE IN FACES.

Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000

Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

Los Angeles, California

October 24, 1999-January 16,2000

Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000

by Robert A. Sobieszek

Cambridge and Los Angeles: MIT Press and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1999

336 pp./$39.95 (sb)

"Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000" is a brave survey of a vast topic: the relationship between photography and the representation of the human face. The show and catalog by curator Robert Sobieszek featured images and ideas ranging from classical theories of physiognomy (the relationship between the face's external, expressive features and internal character) to postmodern work exploding the notion of a unitary self. It's an astonishingly grand project, beautiful to look at while at the same time intellectually ambitious, moving the viewer through multiple complex and demanding histories of science, medicine, politics and art.

The show was chronologically organized in three sections. The first section, "Nineteenth Century: Photography and Physiognomy," covered what Sobieszek labeled the "traditional" approach to the human face, the "belief that the outer person reflected the inner." [1] Located in small gallery, this section assembled some of the best-known nineteenth-century photographs, as well as many spectacular examples of medical and police photography. Julia Margaret Cameron's Julia Jackson as Mrs. Herbert Duckworth (1867) exemplifies the expressive portraitist's pursuit of "ideal beauty" while Joseph T. Zealy's daguerreotypes and Alphonse Bertillon's mugshots record the "blank, clinical" face worn before the instrumental gaze of state and science. This selection of images provided the most inclusive definition of photographic practice: art photography, medical photography, commercial photography and state-sponsored imagemaking were all brought together to support Sobieszek's argument that "from nearly its inception, photog raphy has sought to capture expressive faces, blank faces, and false faces." The gallery exhibited the rich intelligence of Sobieszek's eye: the visual and historic interest of Duchenne de Boulogne's electro-physiognomic studies, Dr. Hugh Welsh Diamond's portraits of the insane and other lesser-known works in this section immersed the viewer in the complex, interdisciplinary history of nineteenth-century photographic practice.

The second section of the exhibition, "Early and Mid-Twentieth Century: Modernist Manipulations," shrinks from the full diversity of nineteenth-century photography to a more narrowly-defined artistic modernism. Skipping both early twentieth-century instrumental photography and pictorialism, Sobieszek argues that "modernist photographers came to doubt the camera's abilities to reveal the soul or the emotions and ultimately lost interest in this goal." The ethnographic agendas of nineteenth-century photographers became aestheticized as early twentieth-century documentary and advertising photographers presented the face as an iconic image, a screen on which to project the viewer's own subjectivity. As Roy Stryker said of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936), "You can see anything you want in her. She is immortal." [2] The photographs depict vacant faces, formerly indicative of state power but used by twentieth-century modernists to refute the legibility of facial semiotics. The initial image in this series is Paul Strand's modernist declaration Blind Woman, NY (1915) which is followed by work by Max Burchartz, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, August Sander, Dorothea Lange and others. The emblematic figure for this middle section of the show was Andy Warhol. Warhol's work represents the final shift within modernism by the '50s from the face as an index for the subject's inner character to the face as a blank screen or mirror, reflecting the viewer's subjectivity rather than the subject's

While I have no great quarrel with Sobieszek's argument concerning the interpretation of physiognomic meaning in modernist photographic practice, his shift in emphasis from science to art, characterized by the move from Duchenne to Warhol, renders invisible the role of state power in the twentieth century. One of the section's last images recording the often pernicious relationship between state power and photographic representation was Nhem Ein's Untitled (No. 5184) (1978), an eerily quiet portrait of a Cambodian woman who was one of 7000 prisoners photographed and executed by the Khmer Rouge in the Tuol Sleng prison camp between 1975 and 1979. The blank face of the soon-to-be-executed woman was placed between two other "blank faces" of modernism: Diane Arbus's Boy with a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C. (1967) and Irving Penn's Cat Woman (1970). Despite the information given on a discrete label, the placement of Ein's photograph drained the image of political meaning in favor of a gen eral aesthetic won at the expense of history. As historian and critic Charles Merewether argued in an eloquent discussion of these prison portraits during a one-day symposium during the exhibition, the "ghost in the shell" of this particular image is multiple: "the subject who has been killed but whose image remains, those of the perpetrator and photographer who are present but not imagined, and those of ourselves always elsewhere, arriving too late." [3] Sobieszek's radical recontextualization leaves these ghosts unaccounted for, indicative of the exhibition's marginalization of power in twentieth-century work.

The third and final section of the show, "Late Twentieth Century: Postmodernist Posturings," included contemporary images to argue that in recent years, visual artists have definitively severed the link between appearance and meaning, between physiognomy and character. As Sobieszek argues in a text panel, the postmodern is "theatrical and often intentionally deceptive." In recent years, "artists have used computers, prosthetics, and even plastic surgery to deconstruct and reconstruct the face, suggesting that human character may be nothing more than a patchwork of poses and expressions." Annotated by the work of Thomas Ruff, French performance artist Orlan and Daniel Lee among others, Cindy Sherman unsurprisingly emerged as this section's foundational artist, in whose work the face is simply a "matrix of constantly shifting, multiple identities at once true and false, assumed and genuine, feigned and sincere." As Sobieszek had already demonstrated in the first section, "dramatic vignettes and feigned express ions have been photographed since the earliest days of the medium." Physiognomic culture in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe and nineteenth-century America can be attributed to the very modern anxiety that appearances cannot be trusted, that the face of the confidence man is shrouded in a multiplicity of shifting selves. Physiognomy promised a science for reading through the theatrical and the feigned, for distinguishing character from what became known in the early twentieth century as "personality." What has shifted in the postmodern work is what one is seeing through to: the failure of meaning and the absence of any "authentic" self. Sobieszek brilliantly concludes the show with Bruce Nauman's 1990 two-channel video and sound installation "Raw Material: Brrr ...," which portrays Nauman's futile efforts to pronounce even his first name, while his kinetic, contorted face thematizes the triumph of surface and the poverty of physiognomic meaning.

In the show's catalog, Sobieszek allowed himself a more complex organizational schema, as well as the opportunity to engage with some of the voluminous writing on the human face. With the figures of Duchene, Warhol and Sherman as anchors, Sobieszek ranges a near full history of physiognomy, pathognomy and phrenology from Aristotle to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The result is a stunning, if exhausting, cultural history of science, medicine and art. There has never been a book (nor an exhibition) like Ghosts in the Shell, possibly because few would dare to cover so much material in one monograph. But Sobieszek is a brave soul, and his beautifully produced, richly illustrated catalog will be an important resource for future work in this area.

Sobieszek's curatorial boldness created a rich visual experience, full of quiet contrasts and delightful surprises. Yet my allegiance to historical specificity balked at the exhibition's sometimes brash juxtapositions. In his effort to impose a narrative framework on what is nearly all of human photographically-based portraiture, Sobieszek has made some connections that, while visually intriguing, fail to make a convincing historical argument. What, for example, is the historical relationship between Nicholas Nixon's Alzheimer patient (M.A.E., Boston, 1985), with her wide eyes milky with age, and Nancy Burson's composite portraits of 5 Vogue Models (1989)? In explaining the connection between these two sets of blank, modern faces, Sobieszek would have us return to the English eugenicist Francis Galton, whose nineteenth-century investigations in psychometrics sought to link facial measurements, photography' and hereditary characteristics. Yet the similarities here are only skin-deep: while Burson clearly appr opriates Galton's methodology for a modern commentary on standardization and beauty, Nixon's deeply empathetic portrait could not be further from the visual empiricism of Galton's work, historically and aesthetically. Here, the historical specificity of Weimar Germany, 1980s Boston and late nineteenth-century Britain is rendered irrelevant in favor of a loose association. The fact that both Burson's and Nixon's images depict the human face within the context of a generalized typology is not enough to build an argument about either aesthetics or history.

Without historical specificity, the show threatened to retreat to the glib safety of what each image, and all of us, have in common: the face. After decades of identity politics and a focus on difference as constitutive of relations of power, this return to the human family bears watching.

ELSPETH H. BROWN is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Yale University and a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

NOTES

(1.) All quotations unless otherwise noted are from Robert A. Sobieszek, Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1999), p.253.

(2.) Ibid., p. 138.

(3.) The 7000 photographed subjects represent less than half of the 14,200 prisoners killed; there were seven survivors. See Charles Merewether, "Exposure: Face to Face with Mortality," Ghost in the Shell Symposium, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 18, 1999.