Portraiture, as exemplified by Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring  (c/ 1665), was once based on a passive and stationary subject, and artistic control rested solely in the hands of the artist.  This definition of portraiture persisted for centuries, but the entry of cameras into the process opened another door.  The subject, under some conditions, gained control over the image.  The 23 photographers in this show have given their subjects more or less control over the final result.  In some cases, the subjects are oblivious of their being photographed, and their actions are unconscious.  In other cases, the subjects are knowing and active participants in the process.  The accusatory gaze of the subject in Kerstens' Paper Roll (2008) suggests antipathy between photographer and subject.

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This exhibition explores the aesthetic, psychological, and emotional implications of the gaze in photography today.  In contemporary portraiture, the long-established hierarchy of artist and model has often morphed into a partnership in which both contribute to the creative process itself, rather than just to the final product. When the sitter is an active participant, rather than a passive subject, a dynamic negotiation is set into motion that changes, challenges, and complicates the traditional notion of portraiture. The power of the gaze is blurred the moment the sitter becomes complicit in the art-making process. The conventional concept of authority is subverted, and a dynamic relationship between artist and subject develops.  

The photographic portrait today can reflect the sitter, the photographer, or the viewer—or an amalgam of all three. The resultant ambiguity renders unclear, or even unimportant, who is representing whom. With this reversal, negative becomes positive, and the latent image disrupts the aim of the gaze while calling into question the truth of representation.  

Historically, the gaze in portraiture was one-directional: the traditionally male viewer held the implied power of observation. In contemporary portraiture, however, the gaze can go both ways. The subjects pictured in Post Portrait are in full control: they reveal or conceal, invite or discourage a returned gaze. These artists confront the validity of voyeuristic privilege while also reconsidering representations of gender and aesthetic conventions.

 Post Portrait is presented as a counterpoint to Robert Henri's California Portraits: Race, Realism and Religion, 1914 - 25. It offers a critical look at the creative—and ever expansive—practice of portraiture some hundred years after Henri, in the hands of artists who came of age amidst different debates about multiculturalism and identity politics and with a quite different approach to artistic authority.

Programs at the San Jose Museum of Art are made possible by generous support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San Jose, and contributions by members of the Board of Trustees and the Director's Council.