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Laurie says:
The exhibition is at the Ph21 Gallery, and is part of the official program of the Hungarian Month of Photography. Portraits Without Faces is a curated international photography exhibition that runs from October 20 – November 12, 2022.
My photograph in the exhibit is Bubu’s shoes from my Women of Japan project. It’s an extract from the full portrait. (The full portrait is in the gallery that the link leads to.)
I’ve used the “Extracts” both in my book Familiar Men: A Book of Male Nudes and on my website, but this is the first one I’ve submitted to an exhibition.
The opening (zoom and live) was on the 22nd. Zsolt Bátori, the director of the gallery, commented that the thing that particularly interested him about the photograph were the complex shadows. Obviously my obsession with shadows isn’t new, but since I compose mostly in the camera and fairly intuitively, I hadn’t really noticed it consciously.
Portraiture emerged as one of the most prominent genres of depictive media early in the history of the visual arts; tacit or explicit rules, conventions and cultural expectations have always influenced the ways in which artists approached the genre. Photography is no exception. Numerous different and characteristic styles of portraiture emerged throughout the history of the medium. We usually assume that faces are necessary components of portraiture; we may, however, learn just as much about the character, the personality of a person by looking at images that depict other parts of their bodies, show us the objects or places associated with them. Not focusing on the face may open up a new dimension of interpretation. Our Portraits Without Faces exhibition is dedicated to this challenging divergence from the more conventional approaches to the genre. – PH21
Since most of my portraits included the body (many of them are nudes), this is familiar territory for me and I was delighted to have the opportunity to submit an “Extract” and to have it in the exhibition.
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