Portrayal – Gerard Yunker
The word portrayal is often used to describe the ‘fixed’ or finite image in art. Yet the whole idea
of portrayal is about action—the process of art rather than the final ‘art object’. For even as a
still image, the human face exists in the moment-to-moment reality of thought, which involves
change and movement. That more static word ‘portrait' is one which is also taken for granted,
and yet in the history of art there is probably no other term more loaded with meanings and
symbolic associations.
For me, rather than 'building up' a portrait, this process had more to do with the emptying out of
expression, of colour and inflection, and of everything we associate with portrayal. Yet they
became portraits, in a very real sense, even though they seem on the surface to contravene the
whole idea. Throughout this series I was working almost subconsciously towards a kind of
reduction, which felt at times like working in the dark. It became clearer day by day as I worked
on each piece, that in that process of emptying out, I could get to something raw and stark, and
real. In some way they were about the feeling of nothingness—the sense of leaving things bare,
of not imposing meaning onto these works. Rather than fixed images, I intend them as
layered portrayals, still shifting and changing in the light.
The final images, for me (and not the models, who have an inescapable beauty) are about
reality, and imperfection. They are so raw, and unmitigated, that they also have to be about
trust. There is no attempt on my part to soften, enhance or change anything, and certainly never
to interfere with the integrity of the face. The colour alone comes in and out, becoming saturated
and then drained; the edges sharp, then faded. The geometries that I’ve introduced interrupt the
idea of ‘the image as reality' but do not fragment the subjects. At the same time, they
deconstruct that other reality of perfection which the fashion world exerts. In the end, they
deconstructed my own death-grip on that same perfectionism.
In terms of the process, they almost look to me now like they could be digital images but they’re
artisanal in every sense. My normally spare, high-tech studio was turned into a workshop—total
chaos—that only very slowly came together to make sense. The process itself took me a year to
arrive at, and even then I realized it had to remain spontaneous for each piece. It involved
making micro-decisions from moment to moment as though I were painting. I felt that every
single one of them was a high-wire act, fraught with potential disaster at every stage.
Finally, there's a history to these images that is not only about their subjects or my own history
as a photographer, but about Kelly, too. It goes back thirty years to when he and I were working
together in New York City—Kelly at that time in collaboration with Ford Models. Kelly’s own
agency, Mode Models, has since become one of the most prestigious in the world, as have
many of the models who began their careers with him. As each one of them would tell you, this
is a relationship based on complete trust. A year ago when I went to Kelly and said I wanted to
photograph these extraordinary women without any of the things that are elemental to their
profession—makeup, hairstyling, pose, expression—he wasn’t necessarily on board, but he said
yes. So thank you, Kelly and models, for your trust in me.