For whatever the reasons, we have always been fascinated with portraits, and the advent of photographic portraiture only made our obsession all the more pronounced. Photos of nudes or the deceased hold a certain fascination, but it’s the faces we seek to preserve, to possess, to lock up in a moment of time, these captures of our families’ and our friends’ and our own faces, before the actual faces grow old and wrinkled and fall to dust.
Maybe it’s because we believe we, and our loved ones, will live forever in our studio or snapshot portraits. It is no wonder then that there is a part of us that suspects that when a photo portraiture artist manages to capture a face precisely as that face is known to him/herself or to others (or reveals something in a face none has noticed before) that artist has performed a secret ceremony involving wizardry, time travel and soul theft that cannot be alibied away with reassuring talk of pixels and light exposures. When it happens, it is nothing short of magical.
