1In the advent of camera development and wide-spread amateur use of photography, depicting oneself via this particular spectrum has been a double-facet practice: capturing one’s social life’s particular moments has enabled the individual to both portray and be portrayed, that is, as the portrayer, directing, staging, editing the photograph; on the other side of the lens, as the subject and recipient of portraiture, analyzing it, making it its own, even rejecting it. Visual snippets have become both ordinary and expansive, unattached to a particular discipline, comprising a complete experience in synchronic harmony between object and subject. Without going as far as erecting modern portraiture as a field (champ constitué), the present paper explores the broad and, sometimes, contradictory approach of portraits, in their visual or textual forms. These ways of depicting can jointly evoke those who create them and those who receive them, or separately, the one who creates them or the one who receives them. Not without risks at times, they can draw from social sciences, offer alternative perspectives and occasionally assist in conveying subtleties and nuances that what would otherwise be challenging to transmit.
2“The power of the image,” as Louis Martin (quoted by Belting, H. 2004: 241) tells us, “is the light and its inseparable and transcendental reverse, the shadow, the invisible within the light itself”. Portraiture isn’t always an image, but even then, there is a striking family resemblance.
3The notion of portrait evokes a variety of fields: written, scriptural, pictorial, epistolary, radiophonic, cinematographic, epigraphic… It is the literary rendez-vous between academic, technical terminology – think of descriptions that detail, step by step, the operation, functionality, and inner workings of a household appliance – and fixed images evoking movement, proportions, volume. In essence, it is an omnipresence that engages all our senses and draws from both reason and emotion, emotion as in both great turmoil (émoi) and in motion, in movement.
4It’s precisely this (in) motion ̶ this potential for movement, for a slight but significant shift of perspective and perception ̶ concerning both the receiver and the model that portraiture has continuously inspired literature and art (cubism for instance, whose abstract breaking and reassembling of bodies drive us to question our own relationship with form) or even philosophy (Jean-Paul Sartre’s café waiter in Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, who, unable to transcend his situation and venture to exist freely, plays at being a waiter in a café); This potential for movement and perception, regularly extended and altered by new technology ̶ from analog to digital photography, from camera phones and digital imaging to the multiplier effect of social network platforms ̶ is justification alone for portraiture to stand as the cover star for the Journal des Anthropologues. Portraiture sustains form and substance, knowledge and thought, and works against foregone conclusions, the possibility for interference in L’histoire à venir (Boucheron P. & Hartog F. 2018) and how to reach it. Boxes of archives, interviews, observations and other field diaries are nothing if not fragments of portraits; statistical data, sketches, interview excerpts mashups, bits and pieces of conversations, of stories, of anecdotes viewed as significant…, as well as carefully selected personal documents, photographs and references breathe life into research findings and help materialize conceptualizations. Portraiture is all at once material, method, and discretion of meaning depending on whether one focuses on their collection, their language of sharing, or what they indirectly testify to.
- 1 The book is the result of a reflection carried out from 2005 to 2009 within the Laboratoire d’anthr (...)
5A little over a decade ago, the collective work coordinated by Josiane Massard-Vincent, Sylvaine Camelin and Christine Jungen, titled Portraits. Esquisses anthropographiques (2011)1, already explored the portrait “as a modality for capturing human experience,” rekindling a familiar query that runs through our disciplines: “the relationship between personal experience and society” (Massard-Vincent J., Camelin S. & Jungen C., 2011, 13). Starting from the uniqueness of the experience, how can we understand, describe, and above all, write about humans in society? The authors’ attempt is “to relieve the apprehension of the individual from the social and cultural determinants that confine singular development within collective identities, while still enabling the capture of a socially situated experience, framed within a specific place and time” (2011, 14-15). An attentive writing to the singular ways of existing in this world.
- 2 Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches.
6In the wake of Massard-Vincent et al., this issue of the Journal des Anthropologues seeks, in its own humble way, to question the role, status, and relevance of portraiture in anthropology and sociology, in history and art. Must we name theory? How can portraiture specifically help express it? On its own, would it still be considered a monograph? In this regard, is there a concern that, by moving away from the abyss of comparison, portraiture may resist generalizations? On the scale of our academic hierarchies, it struggles to attain the prestige of abstraction, understood as the noblest form of theorization. What forms of writing then establish legitimacy? Decline, eulogy, tribute, ego-histories of an HDR2 (more akin to self-portraiture), lynching, in memoriam (see the one dedicated to Marc Augé) – are these merely staged depictions of the other or oneself ̶ mere instrumentalizations? Conversely, are they always more than simple singularities?
Wall of portraits, Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris
- 3 Coralie Morand questions this practice in the context of her fieldwork in a genocide-stricken area (...)
7Portraits illustrate specific names and identities: those who are famous, those who no longer have a name, or those whose names have been changed through protective (or considered protective) anonymization3. Void of distinct features but sharing a common history, portraits sprung to life in negative: think as much of the Unknown Soldier and its eternal flame as the lists of names of victims on the walls of memorials worldwide ̶ for example, those of the Holocaust or the Vietnam War. Or think of the impromptu collages on the buildings in French cities that remind us when a new femicide has occurred. What does portraiture offer to leave a trace? How does the emotion of this sudden encounter, the possibility for projection it provokes (for example, the anthropomorphized building Donjon in Liège, dissected by Emeline Curien) – dialogue with the aspiration to conduct research?
8This dossier invites us to twist and stretch a collection of portraits: whether of individuals or things, unknown or known, ordinary or prestigious, in an attempt to hear them speak not only about themselves but also beyond themselves. It delves into the weight of the social and environmental world each of them carry, of the joys and sorrows they witness, be they torn apart or arranged. It aims to contemplate complexity through a small keyhole, occasionally lifting the veil of illusion, uncovering absence, or revealing triviality. Whether reading between the lines or directly, it seeks to question what the use of portraiture may signify, drawing from the tactics and strategies dear to Michel de Certeau.
9One characteristic of portraiture is the articulation it allows between the long-term perspective of annals, which is inherently anthropological in its relationship to history, and the capture of contemporary stages. This capture has been an integral part of the editorial policy and ambitions of the Journal des anthropologues throughout its over forty years of existence. Since “the time factor underlies every elaboration of the portrait” (Massard-Vincent J., Camelin S. & Jungen C., 2011, 21), portraiture records multiple temporalities, allowing us to experience the duration of a life and to highlight the role of history in individual trajectories. For Albert Piette, creating a portrait is “studying existences, singular individuals who live, that is, who continue from moment to moment, from situation to situation” (Piette A., 2011, 206).
10Historically, portraiture was initially an ancient tradition reserved for an elite, such as portraits of noble lineages along monumental staircases, political leaders, and sometimes their wives. Later, it extended to industrialists ̶ men and women who leave a name and a face in history. It quickly became a transformed, democratized, and renewed possibility of expression through technical progress. Since Nicéphore Niépce and Louis-Jacques Daguerre, old album cardboard boxes, gathering moisture in cellars and attics, have accumulated. There are countless black-and-white (and later color) photographs of posing infants, of new lyweds captured in front of the city’s most beautiful park, of baptized and communed children, sometimes even of the deceased in their Sunday best, stiff and watched over in their final room. The aim is to capture the event by its actors, heroes and heroines of the moment. It is then a reappropriation of prestige and respectability by ordinary people, by those of lesser status, everyday women and men. In this sense, portraiture is more than mere figuration (backgrounding). More precisely, figuration and envisagement (to use the term employed in the following pages by Dominique Dehais) speak beyond the figures, faces, people, buildings, factories, represented, or described. This is a writing that goes against the background characters abundantly found in cinema – nameless figures of an indistinct crowd that only highlights the star, a distinct echo to a time when only the powerful were subjects of narrative and portraits. Figuration and envisagement open up sociological processes (Jean-François Laé evokes this in his different publications as well as his interview for this issue of Le Journal des Anthropologues) or anthropological processes (David Le Breton in the words he exchanges with Laura Apolonio). Portraiture often conceals a system and its derailments: as such, it is no simple mean of representation, but social and subjective. This social dimension of portraiture stands at its very core (in Laé’s case, they are matryoshkas of portraits); names, features, and life stories fade in favor of their overall meaning in a given era (this is more the case with Le Breton).
11While portraiture most often officially aims to convey and illustrate norms, representations, difficulties, structural and conjunctural resonances, and connections between a particular socio-history and a contextualized society as a whole, it has been used to serve dogmatic enterprises. As a means to glorify dictators and establish the hierarchy of “Great Men,” it has been suspected of creating misleading heroic hagiographies and propagating agendas. For better or for worse, portraiture holds great power ̶ the power of portraiture, just as there is a “power of narrative” (Laé J-F., Madec A., Murard N., 2016); one that should not be placed in all hands. When transposed to the social sciences, do these risks continue, insidiously so, to manifest themselves, or are they countered? If so, how? In essence, what does portraiture signify for those who use it to weave meaning and communication? In this weaving, what is common or divergent between the painting of the monarch, depicted in all its majesty and glory, traditional school years pictures, and successions of shots born of burst mode selfies? It sometimes happens that instead of being a fragment that allows access to a whole, making that whole tangible and perceptible, the portrait becomes the seemingly innocuous Trojan horse of asserted or unconscious enterprises of control and domination; an ideological instrument of sorts.
12Nevertheless, doesn’t portraiture confront us time and time again with a form of elusiveness of the individuals and social worlds that we are attempting to describe? Always fragmentary, combining multiple perspectives, these portraits often remain “anthropographic sketches” (Massard-Vincent J., Camelin S. & Jungen C. 2011): a gap, perhaps an honesty, the limits of certainty. Portraiture also provides access to the inner workings of the investigation by revealing the ethnographer’s relationship with the people they encountered ̶ such as the presence of the portraitist or their reflection in the painting. During our exchange, Jean-François Laé reflects precisely on the long-term relationship with those he met in poor neighborhoods or archives. Thus, in many cases, the portrait reveals not so much assurance of scientific knowledge as the sometimes indecipherable movements of the living that one captures. When the researcher is no longer quite sure, the portrait can swift down to the rescue.
13Drawing the lines of a portrait also always involves sorting, in this case, significant sorting: why does Aunt Odile never get her close-up in the family photos at Christmas? Does she suffer in silence or protest loudly? Is she the unloved one, or does she willingly avoid the camera? But then, can creating a portrait be an act of violence? Some religions are wary of it enough to banish it. We think of Islam, but we also remember the battle between iconoclasts and iconophiles in the Byzantine Empire, the “Iconoclast Controversy” of the 7th to 8th centuries, which emptied churches of portraits of saints, representations of Mary and Christ, replacing them with abstract forms, faceless images, a pre-modern art of sorts. Similarly, many denominations of Protestantism explain their rejection of representations of biblical figures because these limit spiritual elevation and direct communion with an elusive God, precisely resistant to tangible portraiture.
- 4 Marshal of France (Maréchal de France) is a French military distinction awarded to generals for exc (...)
14Since the advent of digital technology, printed photographs (traces of life) have become scarce. Which do we actively choose to print, and according to what criteria? Additionally, in the mass of judicial archives and extracted testimonies, how did the history of this particular defendant appeal to the researcher’s mind and writing pen when another, who left just as many tangible traces, did not find favor in academic writings? These seemingly mundane questions intersect with the favor and sometimes fascination found insensational news: why are ones successful, spread leisurely and repetitively in regional and national daily press, mobilizing all airwaves, while othersare, at best, limited to a meager brief mention? It is no coincidence when Jean Rolin chooses to supplement his presentation of the Marshals of the Empire4 with the tragic end of Ginka Trifonova, a young Bulgarian prostitute murdered in 1999 near one of the Boulevards des Maréchaux in his novel La Clôture. Other murders of sex workers are recorded every year in the capital; however, Ginka Trifonova’s terrible demise occupied French media, journalists, and researchers for more than twenty years. In the early 2000s, prostitutes from the Bois de Vincennes and Boulogne referred to it, turning the case into an urban legend (Deschamps C., 2011); in 2007, national French public television France 3 produced “The Lifeless Body of a 19 year-old” (Un corps sans vie de 19 ans); in 2018, journalist Philippe Broussard published “Finding Ginka” (A la recherche de Ginka); in 2021, the justice system reopened the case; in 2023, national French broadcasting station Europe 1 aired a poorly named series called “The Dead Girl Who No One Cared About” (La morte qui n’intéressait personne)… Indeed, it so happens that even with the best intentions of honoring or shedding light on forgotten figures of history, creating a portrait can sometimes unintentionally cause harm and prejudice. Until fairly recently, portrayals of successful women in traditionally male-dominated environments (such as architecture, painting, sculpting to name a few) focused primarily on the person, on her personal life without her work. In other words, what does the portrayal of one’s personal life conceal about one’s achievements?
- 5 Stretching portrayal boundaries is an obligation repeatedly found in the applications of French cit (...)
15Individuals are not the only ones subjected to sudden undivided attention and scrutiny: objects, landscapes and artistic works in particular sometimes seduce their way into media attention and coverage. Which ones, and why? One possible explanation is that portrait is, above all else, a relationship with its author, its readers, its viewers. Indeed, whether the portrait is a landscape, a building, a body, a face, a life, a voice, a factory, a worker, … whether it focuses on a heroine, an ordinary man, a celebrity, a profession, a sacred place, a territory5, a zone (as Misia Forlen describes it for Port-Jérôme), an institution, a neighborhood, a feeling,.. whether it evokes the #MeToo movement, the defendant for the Public Prosecutor, the typical delinquent for impatient media… all those components fall short in the face of social relationships. In this sense, it relates to one of the most fundamental queries in social science: within the personal bonds uniting scholars and lay people, acquaintances and strangers, irreducible or compatible strangers, how is the diversity of social relationships woven?
16Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean are “mythical character depictions” of the western literature. The man with the broken spring is lazy by choice, lethargic by preference; the little girl, asleep and immersed in a dreamlike, whimsical, nostalgic tale, reflects a world that adults have lost and can never regain; the convict, condemned yet imperishable, redeemed, turned industrialist and mayor, doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice everything for the happiness of Cosette, his adopted daughter. All three are paradigmatic characters of the human condition in its aspects of mediocrity, phantasmagoria, and adventure. More recently, female and male writers have been able to capture and offer readers the underlying layers and facets of ordinary life among their fellow citizens. We think of Svetlana Alexievich, who shares one of the commonalities with Jean-François Laé in having been an educator, and her investigative method (their investigative method) aimed at illuminating the inner lives of unknown individuals and voiceless individuals. Her journalistic work eventually turned into literature, culminating in the Nobel Prize in 2015: she had ordinary female soldiers of the Red Army recount their experience of war during World War II in The Unwomanly Face of War (1985); in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, her most famous book, Voices from Chernobyl, is an exploration of the real life consequences for thousands of Belarusians that lived in the vicinity (1997); the traumas of Soviet soldiers involved in the war in Afghanistan are also discussed through portraits (1990); finally, the emotional struggles and suicidal tendencies of the disillusioned in the post-Soviet era since Perestroika are portrayed in Enchanted by Death (1995)… Her writing, drawn from hundreds of organized testimonies, remains ever minimalist, clear, straight forward and candid. The absence of a particular focus on a unique, individual story allows her narrative to grow and become the shared story of the countless women and men who, in the second half of the twentieth century, sought to fight against the invader, sacrificed themselves to defend their homeland, struggled to mitigate the ravages of war and disaster. Her portraits are one and the same; they ooze stories of endless misfortune, from the particular to the universal, where collected memory becomes collective and paves the way for historicity.
17Alexievich’s work andher mastery of portraiture serve as a bridge between those who experience and live through difficulties firsthand in social work, the desire to inform and stimulate thought through her journalistic activities, and the emotion, excitement, and displacement that she hopes to provoke in her readers. As a Belarusian author writing in Russian, she is also well placed to understand the two facets of portraiture, sometimes used as a tool to support dictators (propaganda), sometimes as a means to shake oppressive powers. Her writings also compel us to break down boundaries between different registers and implicitly challenge those in sociology or anthropology who claim that portraiture belongs only in visual arts or literature.
Hobo Family (Dorothea Lange, 1939), from the 2018-19 Jeu de Paume exhibition « Dorothea Lange. Politique du visible »
Paris, Center for modern and postmodern photography and media (dossier de documentation).
- 6 In May 2021, the University of Namur (Belgium) organized a conference focusing on power and hierarc (...)
18Isn’t it through portraiture that we are sometimes allowed to access the depth of humanities and social sciences, via the famous “gem” of an article or a book? It is indeed common to come across portraits in history, sociology, and anthropology publications-Bernard Lahire, in his 2002 Portraits sociologiques, honors them with the title for his work-however, they still receive relatively little theoretical reflection in the disciplines that primarily concern us, and only partially with the study of portrait photography (Sontag, 1977; Edwards, 1991)6. Because the advent of photography and the institutionalization of social sciences are contemporaries, the former is also (along with ethnographic film, for the same reasons) a privileged medium for sociology and anthropology materialization: Dorothea Lange’s photographic work on the Great Depression in the United States, and portraits of Chicago’s hobos in particular, are held in high regard and often used to illustrate studies on poverty – be it its struggles or simple glimpses of small joys.
19In our respective or shared fields, all three of us have stretched the portraits of places and figures seen and revisited, heard and listened to again (Deschamps C., Laé J-F., Overney L. and Proth B., 2018). These places can be the La Duchère grand ensemble (large housing project) in Lyon, France, and its remarkable network of associations (Overney L., 2019), an architectural school and the carrying tensions between different disciplinary approaches (Deschamps C., 2021), the emblematic cultural center Le Volcan in Le Havre, France, through the eyes of a collaborator of its star architect Oscar Niemeyer (Dousson X., Proth B., 2020). The individuals we engaged with during our research may have shared their inhibited intimacy (Proth B., 2005), may have given out the records of private correspondences (Overney L., Laé J-F., 2021), may have talked about their own strategies dealing with poverty, sexual orientation, stigma (Deschamps C., 2011), HIV infection, exclusion, addiction… In their own words, signs and situations, they managed to help us shed light on aspects of a social history: moments of family respite, impulse control, daily jobs and temporary employment, housing arrangement, erasing of debt… Personal stories that drive, shape, and reshape our investigations, with the humbling awareness that we, sociologists and anthropologists, are nothing without the active participation and willingness to be seen of our informants.
20In her Conversation with Annie Ernaud (2023) as well as her autobiography (Lagrave R-M., 2021), Rose-Marie Lagrave defines portraiture (or self-portraiture) as the subject itself. It might seem like a stretch, but portraits work the same way as written stories: they are the flesh, the tangible, the accessible. Without going as far as making it and obligatory passage to social understanding, we humbly invite our contemporaries to Faire avec portraiture: compose it, narrate it, incorporate it into the broader arsenal of the social and narrative forces. Except for the occasional updates and reiterations, this dossier will provide neither definite answers nor new theoretical or empirical perspectives. It is a simple invitation for you to share individual testimonies, moments, and places narrating events carrying universal significance. Perhaps also, this article is our way of taking a stance against the contemporary trend of linear calibration of sociological or anthropological expectations and publications, which suggests that we can confidently practice a distant, detached and unemotional form of social science, without acknowledging the influence of those that keep reminding us – on the ground, in our archives, in our landscapes – that nothing is quite square.
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