When I was asked to write about portraiture I thought, this will be easy, I can write about my ideas as they relate to photography. But the more I thought about this, the more complex it became—really, what is a portrait?

This simple question leads to many more, and that is what is of interest. If we take the premise that a portrait is a likeness of someone then whose likeness is it—the subject or the artist? What effect does the medium in which the image is created have upon the portrait? Does a painted portrait (e.g., by Lucian Freud) contain some special “truth” because it took time to make and, therefore, the artist and the subject have a shared intimacy? Is a photographic portrait more precise and “realistic” than a painted portrait, and if it is, does it carry with it more “truth”? And finally, the proliferation of video portraits suggests that over time a more accurate (i.e., truthful) likeness can appear—but this leads us full circle to my initial inquiry. Is it a depiction of the sitter or the artist?

The Berger quote above is poignantly accurate. As an artist, I strive to “peel back” layers to show something of my subject and myself. It is difficult to describe precisely how this is accomplished. I am always looking for that moment, that light, that gesture or look in which to frame the image. If the fiction created reveals something, I have accomplished my work. It could be simply that the image helps frame the right question, or makes the viewers reflect upon a moment in their own life that is in some way analogous to the portrait—to an overall psychology it is not possible to quantify.

Works that possess this quality—portraits by August Sander, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Nicholas Nixon—continually challenge me to look deep into the image, the artist, and myself. I marvel at the revelations I experience with each viewing of images that contain simultaneously the specific likeness of the sitter and an archetype that I carry in my mind’s eye.

The Frye asked Robert Lyons, a photographer living in Berlin and Seattle, to write about portraiture. His most recent publication, Intimate Enemy: Rwanda in the Aftermath of Genocide, will be released in early 2006 by Zone Books. Also, look for Robert’s Fly on the Wall comments for Celebrity Soul in Gallery A.