Self-portraiture has a long history in art, although artists were not so keen to represent themselves in the past as they are today (except for Rembrandt and around 80 self-portraits he painted over 40 years).
The invention of photography revolutionized visual arts and provided artists with another medium to capture not just the world around them but themselves as well. The current exhibition at Galerie la Patinoire Royale Bach in Brussels brings two sets of self-portraits together, showing different approaches to self-portraiture in photography by American artists Melissa Shook and Ken Ohara.
Titled Autoportraits au Quotidien, the exhibit focuses on two major artists' series from 1972 and 1973.
Being in the World
The exhibition is the first time the works by Melissa Shook (1939–2020) and Ken Ohara (b.1942) are brought together. Showing the artists' significant series of self-portraits created between 1972 and 1973, the show emphasizes their various approaches to self-portraiture — as a systematic self-portrait, an aesthetic gymnastic, a form of therapy, and as a means of being in the world.
Melissa Shook's series Daily Self-Portraits (1972–73) comprises an ensemble of exceptional and intimate photographs taken in downtown New York. Shook captured them (169 in total) during eight months, of which 31 were added to MoMA's collection in 1975. In comparison to staged images of Cindy Sherman and personal photos of Francesca Woodman, Shook's natural, direct work still remains less known and the present exhibition is one of the attempts to bring it back to public attention.
The series of Japanese-American photographer Ken Ohara, The Diary 1972, was created in the form of a unique leporello made from views cut from contact sheets over one year. Featuring 265 diptychs for each day of the year, the work is partly inspired by Diary of a Century by Jacques Henri Lartigue, whom Ohara met while working at Avedon Studio.
The self-portraits, which the artist calls "my inward view of the day," are paired with images of landscape, figure, or still-life, or "my outward view of the day."
The Belonging
Although the photographs in the exhibition focus on a singular subject — the bodies and the world of their creators — they nonetheless remind us of the greater interconnectedness between humans and their collective belonging to the same species and the world.
This global outlook is underscored by the exhibition of the ONE and GRAIN series (by Ohara) in the glass room of the gallery space. Featuring the portraits of over 500 passers-by captured in New York, the series create a powerful conceptual work with the main exhibit, showing particular and universal next to each other, with individual autonomy circumscribed by its belonging to a group, in this case, the cosmopolitan New York.
The miniature work of Diary 1972, a premonition of our selfie culture, thus finds its counterbalance in the anonymous faces of people, opening the door to empathy and deeper understanding.
