The Gout Supremacist: Portraits of Bad People

Last week’s Time cover of Steve Bannon by Nadav Kander is useful for discussing portraits of bad people. Does Bannon look merely unattractive, evil or both? Or is it a neutral portrait? I see a gout-ridden man with a vicious Listerine habit. Bannon’s Breitbart uses the largest jpeg of the cover on their site, so it can’t be that unflattering.

Left: Nazi businessman Alfred Krupp, by Arnold Newman, 1963
Right: Steve Bannon, by Nadav Kander, 2016 http://pic.twitter.com/RUt1pqLBIN

— Clayton Cubitt (@claytoncubitt)

February 2, 2017

Clayton Cubitt compares the portrait to the famous Arnold Newman portrait of industrialist Nazi collaborator Alfred Krupp, which the composition slightly resembles. The reason the Kander portrait is better than the Newman portrait is because it’s not obvious what Kander’s intention is.

What white supremacists think they look like vs what they actually look like http://pic.twitter.com/QAqXb8CEXd

— dieworkwear (@dieworkwear)

February 2, 2017

I disagree with Jorg Colberg’s “The Need Right Now for Subversive Photography.” Both about what we need and what is actually subversive. We need more information and more uncertainty. Portraits provide a certain kind of information, but they don’t capture the sitter’s soul or let you read their mind. Portraits don’t condemn the sitter. The uncertainty that a viewer is left with is good. Uncertainty is the cousin of doubt and sweet skepticism.

The questions of what a subversive portrait is and can formal portraiture be politically subversive are worth discussing. Most people assume a subversive portrait happens when the photographer attempts to make the sitter look unattractive, which can sometimes mean making the sitter look sinister or evil. Perhaps there’s confusion between subversive photographs which attempt to humiliate a narcissist and politically subversive photographs. Which formal portraits are actually politically subversive? To a false populist, this is a politically subversive photograph.

Colberg accurately points out that Kander’s Trump portrait fits in Kander’s portfolio. Likewise, the Bannon portrait is not an outlier. It’s not subversive. It also provides Time a great cover. In terms of making Bannon or Trump look “evil,” compare the portraits to Kander’s Bernardo Bertolucci, Morrissey or Giorgio Armani. Did Kander admire Bertolucci’s films, but found him to be an asshole? Or the opposite? Uncertainty.

Colberg references the Jill Greenberg McCain illustrations of 2008. I didn’t like them at the time and I don’t think they have aged well. A photographer drawing a bloody mouth and fangs on their own portrait is throwing their hands up. It’s an admission that either their personal photographic method is anemic or photography itself is insufficient. It could have been done by anyone with any stock photo of McCain. The portrait which featured her default style, and ended up on the magazine cover, offered plenty of information.

Newman made many great portraits, but Krupp isn’t one of them. The background story is more interesting than the portrait. There’s little that’s subversive about lighting a Nazi collaborator from below - eighteen years after the war ended.

The best portraits of bad people are neutral, in the way that Kander’s portraits are neutral in the midst of his portfolio. The most effective portraits of bad people illustrate the banality of evil. At the center of this discussion has to be August Sander. He was one of the last century’s best portrait photographers, he made portraits of the century’s worst people. Sander’s son was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1934, and died there in 1944. We can imagine he held some animus towards Nazis. Here are a few portraits Sanders made of Nazis, while the Nazis were still in power:

What we discover is not the face of evil, but dumpy middle aged men with sick ideas. Sander’s gift to the future was to show us that the worst human beings can look like anyone.

The most menacing Sander Nazi portrait I’ve seen is this 1941 portrait. The lighting is default Sander, he photographed this man as he did his artist friends. Did he instruct the Nazi to lower his chin? Did he set up the camera lower than he should have for the man’s height? Uncertainty.

Far more relevant to the current moment is Avedon’s masterpiece series, the Family. In the middle of the grid is a portrait of Henry Kissinger. We know this is as neutral of a portrait Avedon could make, because the entire series is framed and lit exactly the same. Cesar Chavez received the very same treatment. I don’t know what Avedon thought of Kissinger, who is widely accused of war crimes. (Read Christopher Hitchens’ book and make up your own mind.) Did Avedon think Kissinger was evil, but charming in person? Or the opposite? It doesn’t matter, because all the information captured in an Avedon portrait is there and we are left with all the uncertainty that a great portrait provides.