Portraits

In a series of sumptuous portraits, leading New York photographer David Seidner pays homage to 19th-century portraitists such as Ingres, Boldini and John Singer Sargent. The portrait of Helena Bonham Carter that appears in this volume was selected for the millennial exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, as one of the one hundred great photographs of the century. REVIEWS: "Seidner's new photographs assume at once history painting and portraits, two categories once separated in art categorization. They are brilliant works possibly only in the 1990s when we move with a postmodern ease among categories and periods of history. Dressing modern people to appear In the costume and décor of antiquity will qualify as little more than parlor masquerade until we genuinely convinced that there may be plausibility that the apparent likeness is deep. Seidner makes for us a deep history awesome in its range. He intimidates any viewer by the graduate school art history in which a swarthy and beautiful young man can suddenly take your breath away, more for a recollection that you may not have recalled earlier sources than for arresting gaze alone. Seidner requires our erudition, not television show intelligence. He gives us moderns, but he provokes us more deeply into the Renaissance." -Richard Martin Colour throughout