london belongs to me

One could say that such an observation signalled a 'failed' portrait: but I go with Baudrillard, repudiating the idea that one should be drawing out someone's 'inner self' or creating an expression of character: rather, a truly successful photographic portrait, says Baudrillard, is one that catches something alien to the person themselves - meaning perhaps, the physical process or thing that 'one' is, but whose exclusion from thought is constitutive of 'one's individuality/humanity. This after all is what photography excels in, this is its essential strength: capturing the gap between our well-worn ideas of how we like to believe the world is, and the brute fact of its contingency and imperfection.

It's like the inverse of Hirst's shark : Looking into the face, you see that life isn't there, just as looking at the shark you see that death isn't there. The impossibility of life in the lens of the camera. Failed motion capture.

Bacon, of course, painted from a combination of photographs and his own memory of a person, so maybe part of the uniqueness of his work is its success in reintegrating the failed soul-capture of photography with the living entities of memory.

The artifacts of photography, its creation of its own reality, are responsible for the phenomena that happens when you see a celebrity in real life - they never look like 'themselves', because for the first time you are experiencing the whole deal, the physical presence, the rhythms of their movement, the changing relations of their body to the environment.

It's the equally disorienting opposite with portraits: you see a different version of someone: a brutally stilled but somehow compelling alien presence. Or rather, looking at contacts, you see many versions; especially with someone older, you get the sense that you're looking at many different people, different ages, cohabiting, at war. Beneath your habitual synthesis of a person, you suddenly spy their essential multiplicity. And each single frame is a facinating failure to recreate that 'whole' that doesn't, in material reality, exist.

As a child I often used to play a game of staring into the mirror: a thrill of fear, testing myself against the uncanny, staring wide-eyed into the reflection staring back, until all familiarity suddenly drained into the void and I became a drawn, pale alien to myself, a thing of nightmares. Dread recognition of non-meaning.

A portrait can certainly articulate emotional and other qualities of a person, but what it most powerfully articulates, and what should be distilled and treasured in it, is this uncanny glimpse of something unrecognisable, the real nonexistence of people.

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*Footnote on Deleuze and Guattari's 'Faciality' - this chapter always makes me laugh because I can't read the title without thinking of it being sung by Billy Bragg to the tune of 'Sexuality' (no.1 unsexiest song of all time)