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Portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since "global" portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when judging them? An analysis of 100 interviews with users from Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States reveals that people consistently recognize genre-specific values in portraits and evaluate them through a narrow set of communication-related criteria. Such evaluations vary across cultures in ways that only occasionally match established comparative literature on values. We reflect on the relational character of the criteria adopted for the evaluation of portraits worldwide, highlighting its association with new modes of sociability in digital spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of the human face is addressed from a biocultural perspective, focusing on the empirical investigation of how the face is represented, perceived, and evaluated in artistic portraits and self-portraits from the XVth to the XVIIth century. To do so, the crucial role played by the human face in social cognition is introduced, starting from development, showing that neonatal facial imitation and face-to-face dyadic interactions provide the grounding elements for the construction of intersubjective bonds. The neuroscience of face perception is concisely presented and discussed, together with the psychophysics of face perception and gaze exploration, introducing the notions of the left visual field advantage (LVFA) and the left gaze bias (LGB). The results of experiments on the perception and the emotional and aesthetic rating of artistic portraits and self-portraits are reported, showing that despite participants' inability to tell self-portraits and portraits apart, greater emotional, communicative-social, and aesthetic ratings were attributed to self-portraits. It is concluded that neuroscience and experimental aesthetics can contribute to better understand the human face, hence to better understand ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of an advanced doctoral research course, class members participated in an in-depth exploration of the methodology portraiture. In this article, the authors—course instructor and 10 students—represent themselves as researchers through collage portraits and written reflexive responses. A brief review of portraiture, collage in research, and researcher reflexivity, along with descriptions of relevant course experiences are presented. Images of the collage process and resulting portraits are highlighted. A collage portrait of a class emerges as issues of transparency in research, the role of the researcher, and the use of art in research are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of the film Frida, based on accounts of the life of the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo. Frida may be seen as a tragic hero in the mold of Antigone and Elektra. The paper explores the process by which a self may be created, with special emphasis on the uses of portraiture; it delves into the integration of contraries in the life of the protagonist and offers a psychoanalytic view of the way the self evolves under a variety of conditions. Frida's body has been injured and broken by physical trauma; her mind and spirit have also been influenced by this and other painful events. She fantasizes that she will be cured and made whole by her mentor, lover, husband, and betrayer, Diego Rivera. But Diego's adversary is Death, a personified force to whom Frida has given at least an equal measure of her love. It is inevitable that Death will win in this struggle: Frida, the phoenix, is consumed by fire that is her destruction but also a symbol of her unconquerable passion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The face is a bodily surface that visually, historically and politically locates identity. Under the scrutiny of facial recognition and biometric software, the face can take the place of a whole identity, becoming a rigid singular representation. This paper draws connections between the increasing trends in surveillance and biometric technologies, and their manifestation within contemporary art practices. Specifically, I look to artworks that engage traditional portraiture and representations of the face, all the while manipulating expectations of the face-as-portrait. Artworks included in this project are Ursula Johnson's L'nuweltik (We are Indian), Gillian Wearing's Self Portrait at Twenty Seven Years Old and Anthony Cerniello's Danielle. How has the face come to be represented in contemporary portraiture, and might these representations suggest a shifting logic of identity, away from the face? Art as visual expression is considered in relation to surveillance as another outcome of visual culture that highlights a continuing desire to categorize the subject within a social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A modest pencil drawing believed to be the first self-portrait of Stanisław Wyspiański was executed by the artist on 17 February 1890. This image presents a likeness of a boy, fifteen-year-old at most, which stands in jarring contrast to the actual age of Wyspiański who turned 21 in January 1890. The doubts as to the traditional identification of the sitter are further supported by a comparison of the drawing with two photographs of Wyspiański executed barely half a year earlier than the drawing and his two self-portraits drawn six months later. All of these portrayals represent a mature man with facial hair, whose features strikingly differ from the portrait of the youth in the drawing under discussion. This identification is owed to Antoni Waśkowski (1885–1966) who, however, could not have remembered the looks of the artist in 1890. When he published the little portrait executed in February 1890, he captioned it “Stanisław Wyspiański aged 18”, although he must have known that Wyspiański had been much older at that time. Waśkowski’s status as Wyspiański’s cousin resulted in the fact that for the last 90 years nobody has questioned the inconsistency of his guess, nor has anybody suggested a different identification of the person portrayed in the drawing, either. And there is every reason to suppose that “Wyspiański’s earliest self-portrait” is in fact the only currently known likeness of Kazimierz Brudzewski (1874–1912), Wyspiański’s school-fellow. Evidence of their friendship and of Wyspiański’s high regard for Brudzewski can be found in the painter’s correspondence from the years 1890–1905. Brudzewski’s suicide in 1912 and the disappearance of important witnesses to Wyspiański’s early youth contributed to the fact that there was no one in 1934 to rectify Waśkowski’s erroneous identification of the sitter in the modest pencil drawing. However, this seemingly innocent error has persisted firmly for a very long time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates questions that involve the problematic of the identity in contemporary photographic portraits. Self-portraits are analyzed to discuss the fragility of identities from an artistic production called the Limits of the Daphne, which is composed of a series of appropriate images of the Internet, more specifically selfportraits, selfies. The gesture of self-photographing is approached as an act of identity construction, seeking a theoretical basis in authors who reflect on this theme, such as Annateresa Fabris and Joan Fontcuberta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Études Françaises is the property of Presses de l'Universite de Montreal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A literary criticism of the book "El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno" by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala is presented. The book was reportedly produced as a letter to Spanish King Philip II and latter to Philip III wherein Goma brings his presence in the book using self-portrait and designated himself a prince. Topics include Goma's imagined encounter with the king, use of images to address the king, and the trends in portraiture.

Copyright of Mélanges francophones is the property of Galati University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Previous analyses suggest that artists prefer poses showing the left side of the subject’s face when composing a portrait, but showing the right side when composing their own self-portrait. There is also some evidence that artists may prefer compositions with key features on the right of the picture. Do these findings generalize to spontaneous, pseudo-artistic productions by individuals with no formal training in painting and art history? To investigate this issue, we tested a sample of 104 British schoolchildren and teenagers (mean age = 13.8 years; 80 females). We analysed posing biases in individual photographic self-portraits (“selfies”) as well as of self-portraits including also the portrait of a friend (“wefies”). Our results document a bias for showing the left cheek in selfies, a bias for placing the selfie-taker on the right in wefies, and a bias for showing two left cheeks over two right cheeks, again in wefies. These biases are reminiscent of what has been reported for selfies in adult non-artists and for portraits and self-portraits by artists in the 16th–18th centuries. Thus, these results provide new evidence in support of a biological basis for side biases in portraits and self-portraits independently of training and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a method to modify the apparent relative pose and distance between camera and subject given a single portrait photo. Our approach fits a full perspective camera and a parametric 3D head model to the portrait, and then builds a 2D warp in the image plane to approximate the effect of a desired change in 3D. We show that this model is capable of correcting objectionable artifacts such as the large noses sometimes seen in "selfies," or to deliberately bring a distant camera closer to the subject. This framework can also be used to re-pose the subject, as well as to create stereo pairs from an input portrait. We show convincing results on both an existing dataset as well as a new dataset we captured to validate our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]