Face On: Photography as Social Exchange. (Media).

Mark Ourden, Craig Richardson, eds.

London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000

The title Face On immediately sets up an expectation of something confrontational, a series of essays that will turn a sharp critical eye toward portrait-based photography. The editors Mark Durden and Craig Richardson hope to make us "think about the context for the meeting between artist and subject," and this book, brought to the attention of an American audience somewhat belatedly, does exactly that. The essays approach the subtitle, "Photography as Social Exchange," from different theoretical and historical perspectives to discuss various contemporary artists.

Joanna Lowry's essay introduces Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the "dialogical" to locate power in the exchange between artist and subject. It is dialogical in nature because the "border has been negotiated." thus displacing a traditional semiotic reading of images and offering the photograph as a site for negotiation. Lowry uses juergen Teller's snapshots of young women at the doorstep to his commercial studio, published in Go-Sees, as an exemplary indication of this shift in power because the artistic space is being invaded from several angles. Other familiar names like Rineke Dijkstra and Philip Lorca diCorcia are invoked to show how this liminal space of exchange may be negotiated in different ways.

These ideas are eventually elevated to include the social theories of Marcel Mauss, which consider the portrait as a gift. The collected essays, however, seem somewhat unsure about wide-ranging assertions, and more comfortable with personal reflections such as those offered by Mark Durden. He begins with James Agee's book done in collaboration with Walker Evans, Let us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and highlights ideas of class privilege that remain relevant to contemporary work by Richard Billingham, Tom Hunter and Alfredo jaar. Durden points out how this work aesthetisizes the image, thus disengaging the viewer from the reality of the situation. Moreover, he asserts via Bill Nichols that these portraits will become commodities and fail to "orient us to action."

The last two essays by Craig Richardson and Ian Hunt consider the role of artists who interfere by situating themselves firmly within the space of the work. Richardson claims that artists should not "simply adopt the emotions of their participants," but negotiate the blurred edges of a portrait by being present. Hunt then invokes the photographs of Boris Mikhailov, most notably from Case Histories (1999) where the photographer paid or otherwise compensated his subjects for directorial "access," to question the nature of identity and class structure in such "documentary" endeavors. Hunt's analysis seems to equate artistic ingenuity with anthropological rigor because what "Mikhailov captures is the early progress of an idea of the self as merchantable"--in effect stating that this is a valid social exchange akin to Mauss's economy.

Although these essays succeed in introducing many issues that surround conceptions of portraiture, where the self also becomes other and assumes the character of cultural property, it is mostly the same slippery postmodern space that is revisited. Only Lowry succeeds in her insightful reflection on how certain photographers negotiate with their respective models for power and thereby invoke social exchange in the work of portraying.

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