Activities per year
Abstract
The temporal relationship we have with a portrait, its photographer and sitter, is a phenomenology of the pose – as both portrayal and self-portrayal – in photographic media. The portrait preserves the present on behalf of the future, which looks back at its past. The catastrophe of photography is its emptying out of time, noted most famously in Barthes’ reading of a portrait by Alexander Gardner.
However, the recorded, remembered, and shared image practices in contemporary visual culture reveal an attenuation of time that is at once ‘now’ and ‘then’ as a distinct affective experience that is understandable, legible, and exchangeable. It is full, not empty, but thinned rather than lost. This thin present needs a phenomenology that accounts for combination and duplication, as well as the sensation of loss and separation, as direct experience. I propose that a dialogue between Barthes’ work and Deleuze’s pragmatics allows us to read the time of portrayal as haecceity, where we describe, remember, and reproduce affect as a thing in itself, with its own uniqueness.
However, the recorded, remembered, and shared image practices in contemporary visual culture reveal an attenuation of time that is at once ‘now’ and ‘then’ as a distinct affective experience that is understandable, legible, and exchangeable. It is full, not empty, but thinned rather than lost. This thin present needs a phenomenology that accounts for combination and duplication, as well as the sensation of loss and separation, as direct experience. I propose that a dialogue between Barthes’ work and Deleuze’s pragmatics allows us to read the time of portrayal as haecceity, where we describe, remember, and reproduce affect as a thing in itself, with its own uniqueness.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 7-16 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Revista de História de Arte - Série W |
Volume | 11 |
Publication status | Published - Apr 2022 |
Bibliographical note
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited..
Keywords
- Barthes
- Deleuze
- Portraiture
- Photography
- Time
- haecceity
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Photography and the Thin Present: Barthes, Deleuze and the Time of Portrayal'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Activities
- 4 Oral presentation
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Gardner’s Hogarth: race, emblem, and morality in ‘What do I Want, John Henry?’ (1862)
Sutton, D. (Speaker)
11 Apr 2025Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation
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1865: Cartes de visite, the Lincoln conspiracy, and the evolution of transnational imagination
Sutton, D. (Speaker)
4 May 2024Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation
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‘At work with the Baillie’: reconfiguring assistantship and creative authorship in the Scots migrant community around Alexander Gardner.
Sutton, D. (Speaker)
18 Jun 2024Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation
Research output
- 2 Article
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1865: Cartes de visite, the Lincoln conspiracy, and the evolution of transnational imagination
Sutton, D., 4 Dec 2024, (Accepted/In press) In: Victorian Studies. 67, 3, p. (In-Press)Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Loss and Found: Barthes, Hidden Biography and Ethical Deficit in Alexander Gardner’s ‘Portrait of Lewis Payne’
Sutton, D., 2024, In: Photography and Culture. 17, 1, p. 31-56 26 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile61 Downloads (Pure)
Profiles
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Damian Sutton
- Research Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities - Professor of Photography Theory and Culture
Person: Teaching and Research