GETTING THE PICTURE; `GHOST IN THE SHELL' PUTS A DIFFERENT FACE ON PHOTOGRAPHY.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

It hangs there like an awkward question mark, silently interrogating your humanity. Titled ``Pupil: Pose 1,'' it's a photo-portrait by Katherine Wetzel and Elizabeth King of what appears to be a cyborg or mannequin in thoughtful repose.

Patently artificial yet indisputably lifelike, everything about this creature's face - the pensive mouth, the averted eyes, the slender prosthetic hand cradling the chin - suggests the spark of human consciousness. If this androgynous replicant could talk, you suspect it might say: ``I look as though I feel - therefore, I am.''

Is this the face of virtual emotion, merely, or the real thing? What makes this cyborg's sensitive countenance any less expressive of a unique identity than the flickers of anger, love, pity and terror that regularly transform our own features?

Those are a few of the complex themes raised by ``Pupil: Pose 1,'' one of approximately 175 works in the exhibition ``Ghost in the Shell'' - Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000, which opens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Organized by photography curator Robert A. Sobieszek, this multimedia show of prints, books and videos, based on 30 years of research, examines the history of photographic representations of human identity, personality, character or selfhood - call it what you will.

Since at least the time of Aristotle - who supposedly advised Alexander the Great to pick his commanders according to their facial characteristics - Western culture has construed the face as the locus of human identity. While modern and postmodern art has subdivided and compartmentalized the human body, and the Internet has splintered it into pixels, the face has remained pre-eminent.

Yet the premise behind LACMA's exhibition derives from centuries-old notions of human individuality which - thanks to recent advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and the construction of technology-based ``virtual identities'' - are increasingly up for grabs.

While by no means exclusive to Western art, facial representation has long been a key element of Western culture: from busts of Roman senators to daguerrotypes of 19th-century writers, Picasso's cubist ``anti-portraits'' and Andy Warhol's deer-in-the-headlights Polaroids of Hollywood stars.

Although ``face-reading'' existed in ancient Asian cultures, facial qualities were generally used to indicate nobility and social standing rather than to signify individual uniqueness, according to Sobieszek.

``To read subjectivity and character, especially moral character (in a face), is pretty much a Western thing,'' he says.

Of course, photographers weren't the first to propose that the face could serve as a medium for documenting emotion. Greek and Roman artists, followed by Renaissance painters and sculptors, developed the idea that the face was a mirror of the soul, an external manifestation of the inner man or woman.

Yet by the late 1830s, when photography was born, the ``science'' or pseudoscience of face-reading had attained a cultlike status, Sobieszek writes in the exhibition catalog. In Europe, scientists, physicians and philosophers had codified the idea that human subjectivity could be read from facial features (physiognomy), the shape of the skull (phrenology), or the expression of the emotions (pathognomy).

Enter a Paris neurophysician named G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne, who believed that by applying electroshock probes to specific muscles of the human face - then photographing the results - it was possible to scientifically evoke and document the full range of human emotional expression.

When Duchenne published his experiments in 1862 in ``Mecanisme de la physionomie humaine,'' along with a set of photographic plates, his motives were as much artistic as scientific. Duchenne hoped painters would use his book as a guide to depicting anatomically correct facial expressions.

``For Duchenne, it was very much a wish to have painters do as beautiful portraits as they (could) but still without lying about how the muscles really act,'' Sobieszek says.

As 19th-century theories of art, medicine and social science converged, photos were taken of manic-depressives, tuberculosis patients, criminals, Jews, subjected colonial peoples and immigrants newly arrived in the United States and Western Europe. Doctors, police departments, advocates of racist ``eugenics'' theories and others attempted to use photography to document common facial features from which archetypes could be constructed.

``They developed theories by observation: Look at enough criminals, and if they all have a characteristic that's common, that's a criminal characteristic,'' Sobieszek explains. ``Thereby you can take that characteristic and apply it to somebody else and say, `You must be, if not a criminal, you have the propensity to be a criminal.' ''

``Ghost in the Shell'' demonstrates that the use of photography to certify ``acceptable'' or ``unacceptable'' forms of humanity was brutally alive and well as recently as the 1970s, when the Khmer Rouge made photo-portraits of its prisoners before sending them off to the killing fields.

By the end of the 19th century, however, physiognomy had been largely discredited, along with the belief in photography as an objective record of subjective emotions.

In its place arose the modernist conviction that art wasn't primarily about the subject; it was about projecting onto the subject whatever personal obsessions or aesthetic concerns the artist (and by implication, the viewer) wanted to project.

Simultaneously, new artistic models of human psychology argued that reality could be invented in our minds, that the human eye projects out as much as it takes in.

The resulting new conception of photographic portraiture persisted well into the 1960s and, in many ways, is still with us, Sobieszek says.

``You see a beautiful portrait of Leonardo DiCaprio or Kate Moss, you project your notion of beauty or handsomeness or sexuality. I call it the reversal of subjectivity. If I'm Duchenne, I'm trying to find out what's inside of you. If I'm August Sander, I'm taking a picture from my point of view to do what I want to do. If I'm Edward Weston or (Laszlo) Moholy-Nagy, I'm trying to express the lighting composition, or whatever I want to express.''

The difference between these two phases of art photography can be seen in a comparison of two exhibition works: Alexander Hesler's 1860 print of Abraham Lincoln and Andy Warhol's 1964 ``Self-Portrait.''

In Hesler's work, we're meant to infer from Lincoln's meditative eyes and heavy brow - etched in concern over weighty national matters, no doubt - that this is a man of character. Even the photo's somber sepia palette speaks of Lincoln's presumed moral substance.

By contrast, Warhol's strip of four pasty-faced mug shots, snapped in an automated photo booth, delights in obscuring its nominal subject. Warhol's social status, occupation, and age - let alone what's on his mind - are murky. He could be famous (or at least notorious), or he could be a nobody. The image refuses to say. Only the picture's teasing surface matters, not the feelings of the virtually anonymous human being underneath.

The exhibition's third phase deals with the beginnings of postmodern photo-portraiture in the late 1970s. Sobieszek decided the key figure in this section would be Cindy Sherman, the popular U.S. artist who has spent virtually her entire career photographing herself made up as various fictional personae.

Sobieszek contends that with Sherman's quixotic, self-dramatizing images, photographic portraiture has come full circle with Duchenne's ``experimental visual theater'' of electroshock volunteers.

``Cindy Sherman, I think, epitomizes the dissociation and the multiplicities that postmodernist artists are dealing with,'' he says. ``I think that whole idea of dissimulating, storytelling, narrative fictions and willing complicity between the artist and the viewer goes back to almost the very beginnings.''

When Sobieszek first came across Duchenne's images more than 30 years ago, he was reminded of old Hollywood ``Frankenstein'' movies. Yet the cliche of a mad scientist using machines to stimulate human consciousness no longer seems like pure science fiction.

The exhibition's title comes from Masamune Shirow's futuristic novel, ``Ghost in the Shell,'' in which a cyborg wonders whether its own personality is real or artificial. Today, some scientists assert, it's only a matter of time before the ineffable human soul can be downloaded onto computer software - putting the ghost into the machine, as it were.

A scary and anti-humanist possibility?

``It is absolutely anti-humanist - in the classical sense of the word,'' Sobieszek agrees. ``And I think we might have to re-evaluate or rethink how we define humanism. Because how many prostheses or synthetics do we put in ourselves? And how much emotion and intelligence do we put into machines before there is no difference?''

The facts

What: ``Ghost in the Shell'' - Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000.

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Today through Jan. 16. Museum hours are noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 9 p.m. Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Wednesdays.

Admission: Adults $7; students and seniors $5; children/younger students $1; children 5 and under free. The second Tuesday of every month is free to all, excluding ticketed exhibitions. [phone].

CAPTION(S):

8 Photos

PHOTO (1) ``Djimon Screaming'' (1991), by Greg Gorman

(2) ``Pupil: Pose 1'' (1997-99) photograph by Katherine Wetzel, sculpture by Elizabeth King

(3) ``Ordeal by Roses 32'' (1963), by Eikoh Hoscoe

(4) ``Final Fantasy, Ursula'' (1993), by Inez van Lamsweerde 

(5) ``Self-Portrait/Vivian Holding Camera'' (1996-97), by Yasumasa Morimura

(6) ``Self-Portrait'' (1964) by Andy Warhol

(7) ``Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California'' (1935), by Dorothea Lange

(8) ``Specimen of an Electrophysiological Experiment'' (1862), by G.-B Duchenne de Boulogne.