What ‘the body’ was to photography in last decade of the twentieth century, ‘the face’ is to the first decade of the new millennium — a central motif, and a highly contested terrain.

But ‘the face’ encompasses terrain far broader than is suggested by the term ‘portrait’. Indeed, a substantial number of contemporary image-makers reject the conventional genre of portraiture, considering it to be fraught with tired conventions and discredited assumptions — concerning both the nature of the face itself and the manner of its representation. As the body displaced the nude as a core focus of photographers, so the face is displacing the portrait.

Traditionally in photography, as in popular culture, the face has been considered the primary site and marker of individual identity. The photographer Paul Graham recently summed up this deeply-rooted belief when he defined portraiture as “…one of the most profound things that one can do… to simply and truly see someone, and express their sentience. To reflect the inner self through external appearance.”

The new ‘face’ photography contests this assumption: ‘simply and truly’ is seen as touchingly naïve. They dismiss as myth the belief (fervent though it is) that a successful portrait captures or reveals the essence, the inner being — the soul of the subject. Moreover, they take issue with the idea that a portrait is, by definition, a credible likeness of an individual; they are too aware of the range of manipulative procedures that stand between the subject and the image. While it is true that manipulation has always been a factor in portraiture, the computer has made seamless manipulation easy, fast and cheap, and home — as well as office-based — in other words, universal. Doubt is everywhere apparent: Iraqis scorn the pictures of Saddam’s sons as ‘American fabrications’; Americans scoff at pictures of Saddam during the war — ‘body doubles’. Cynicism is standard fare for both producers and consumers of images. The International Herald Tribune tells us that Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting, posed recently for a promotional portrait, “…in a vile cul-de-sac… the smelliest alley in London.” The paper adds, “The alley is a dizzying change from the setting, just two blocks away, in which Boyle has been interviewed — the ultra-trendy St Martin’s Lane Hotel…” In the public’s visual equation: Boyle equals Trainspotting equals grunge — ergo, give the readers what they crave. Meanwhile, another British personality is warned by the company that owns his image rights that he will actually have to play a certain number of matches (not to win, but in order to be televised and photographed). The purchase of Beckham’s image is a big investment and has to spawn infinite clones.

The producers of the new ‘face imagery’ (for want of a better term, any term must encompass photographers and artists who use the camera) construct their work in a spirit of scepticism, founded on a belief that illusions and falsehoods (or rather half-truths and half-lies) abound. They have broken with the faith, so to speak, of conventional ‘face value’. As Baudrillard has put it, “photography is our exorcism; primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society had its mirrors, we have our images.”

To understand the significance of this break with the faith of face value, we have to look back on a hundred-and-sixty year history of photographic practice where faith reigned supreme. As Ben Maddow rightly observed in his 1977 anthology of portraits, the photographic portrait represented a quantum leap in mankind’s self-knowledge, “…a profoundly new phenomenon […] not only an art but a new form of human consciousness.” Portraits had of course been around for centuries but restricted to elites. Daguerreotypes followed this pattern, but with the arrival of paper prints everyone could have one. And they were astonished to see their likenesses captured with astonishing veracity — like mirrors with memories. Such was the novelty of seeing oneself, Nadar tells us, that several clients who had mistakenly left the studio with the wrong clients’ portraits had gone away delighted with their fidelity.

There was no talk of ‘the soul’ in those early years. In the widespread absence of real mirrors, people simply wanted to know what they looked like. The simple likeness would soon, however, lose its magical aura. After a decade or so, people began to want something more — something more profound — and professional portrait photographers, realising that they could charge more for profundity, began to adopt ‘artistic techniques’, together with an ennobling discourse (a.k.a. sales pitch) to promote the new product. Great claims were made for the capacity of the camera in the hands of a sensitive operator to reveal the soul behind the facade.

In practical terms, this meant appealing to the client’s self-image, to what they wanted to look like. Nadar was staggered by the vanity of his clients, who were furious to discover in their portraits that their looks were not up to their self-image. The shrewdest photographers understood that they would have to learn how to lie. And lie they did — hand-colouring to add glow to a lady’s cheeks, vaseline on the lens to blur wrinkles, a soft-focus lens to disguise a double-chin. And when the photographer’s bag of tricks was not emptied, the retoucher was called in, and his paints saved the day. This was particularly true of the celebrity portrait, as it quickly dawned on photographers that unadulterated portraits of public heroes and heroines fell short of their reputed mythic qualities.

This discourse — that a successful portrait captures the soul — has proved astonishingly resilient. The twenty-first-century public, like its counterpart of the twentieth century, adores portraits of people it already ‘knows’ (fed as we are on a steady diet of such pictures), reading into the portrait the traits it wants to see. Yousuf Karsh’s twentieth-century portraits played shamelessly to the galleries in this regard. His Great Men (and the very occasional Great Woman) were rich in Soul. His Hemingway was The Old Man and the Sea. His Churchill was the rock that had held England fast in the storm. Karsh was always careful to evoke the painted portrait and spoke highmindedly of rendering subjects in Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro. Arnold Newman, a virtuoso of the revealed soul mystique, updated the discourse for modernist sensibilities: if they all know that Stravinsky’s music is ‘uncompromising’, give them a portrait with analogous virtues: strong clean, uncompromising, modernist lines and volumes (Robert Mapplethorpe at least knew that portraits were about one thing and one thing only: pure, unadulterated glamour). But the resilience of the Art-encrusted portrait does not impress the new face photographers, who are far more excited by the ‘lowly’ passport photo, the unpretentious 4- for-£1 photobooth pictures, the refreshingly direct police mug shot, or the vacuous glamour of a Warhol Jackie O. “I need to create a new strategy of representation,” says photographer Alfredo Jaar, realising that portraits of the suffering have, as a genre, been drained of effect.

Of course, as the new face photographers are all too aware, most of the faces we see around us on a daily basis are of a different order anyway — two-dimensional, of often superhuman scale, smiling down on us from countless billboards and screens. These faces are far more beautiful than the pitifully natural ones among which we navigate on a routine basis — happier, immune from stress and the horrors of ageing, and above all, reassuringly familiar, thanks to constant media drip. These faces are grist for the mill of the new photographers.

Tactics (techniques) are of course extremely varied, ranging from conventional photographic manipulation (time-exposures, multiple exposures, photomontage, serial imagery, and so on) to complex computer operations. Some photographers work with found photographs and transform them, others make their own. Scale and framing are other elements which are consciously manipulated for effect. The works of these photographers are extremely varied in every sense. But they are of a single voice in their disdain for the conventional portrait. That is why, in their composite portraits of artist-couples, van Lawick & Muller segue seamlessly from one partner to the other over fourteen intermediate stages; or Gary Schneider builds up faces meticulously with a small beam of light during half-hour-exposures; or John Hilliard overlays one image over another, blocking access to his Blonde.

Thomas Ruff has perplexed critics with his gargantuan faces, which appear to them to be nothing more than overblown passport photographs, conveying nothing as to personality or character. But that’s the point: there is nothing to tell, nothing to hide, beyond what is seen. There is no enigma, no mask. The photographs do what all photographs do — they simply map a terrain, and they map it with a precision that no other tool can match. Why can’t we seem to accept this at face value? Only then, perhaps, will something of the old magic of the mirror be restored.