GALLERY REVIEW
Face to Face
Museum of Photographic Arts
1649 El Prado (In Balboa Park)
619-238-7559
mopa.org
Have you ever taken a photograph of a friend or a family member and thought that the image captured their personality perfectly?
When photography came along and replaced painting as the most popular method of fixing someone’s likeness, it was easy to assume that the resulting print was exactly what the subject looked like because it seemed that no artistic interpretation was involved; you pressed a button and a machine did the rest.
Of course this isn’t true because a photographer manipulates light and lens and composition just as much as a painter wields a paintbrush and paint.
The famous photographer Richard Avedon once said, “All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
He has a point. Are you the same person today as you were ten years ago, inside or out? Do you behave the same way with a friend, with your boss and with a lover? Each of us is just one body but each of us is also a lot of different people all at once and not one of those personas is the truth.
You can ponder this idea at Face to Face: Works from the Bank of America Collection, a rich and diverse collection of portraits at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. There are a number of well-known and lesser known images on display, including a wonderful series of portraits by Rineke Dijkstra depicting a stunning young man as he evolves from an awkward teenage cadet into a more experienced soldier over the course of five to six years.
