The Library of Congress’s notation at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014712606/ (George Grantham Bain collection) indicates that the image is undated, but a date marked on the negative is July 25, 1927.
portrait
Quantitative demo: Dickinson > Poe
The other day I posted this portrait to my Tumblr over a caption by Emily Dickinson: “I see thee better in the dark.”
Instantly the likes and reblogs began pouring in, and by the time the flood let up there were 255 of them.
Last night I posted this portrait over a caption by Edgar Allan Poe: “How statue-like I see thee stand, / The agate lamp within thy hand!”
Total number of likes and reblogs as of late this morning: 2.
A double portrait of Virginia Woolf and William Butler Yeats
The Open Culture blogpost “Virginia Woolf’s Personal Photo Album Digitized & Put Online by Harvard,”
links to Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Monk’s House album 4, dated 1939 but containing items from earlier and later. Online, one undated page from the album looks like this.
Here’s a Photoshopped detail.
How to read satisfactorily
William Butler Yeats contemplates William Blake
Source: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2006005581/. Photoshopped.
Notes toward a theory of this portrait
It must be seen that you aren’t a being that smiles.
Gaze is a contemplative gesture. Downward gaze might represent a self remembering what it has felt; upward gaze might represent a self imagining what it is going to feel. In these instances and all others, the represented self is a self looking inward. Nothing outside the self can be thought to matter. That is, in a portrait nothing except the self can be seen to matter.
Technical note about that: in a portrait, selective focus has the effect of subordinating and excluding from consideration all that is not face, contemplating.
Test: as portrayed, does your face entail the term “distinguished”?
Hooded consciousness and color as mask: toward a theory of the portrait
