For there is indeed such a thing as 'physiognomic perception' which carries strong and immediate conviction. We all experience this immediacy when we look into a human face. We see its cheerfulness or gloom, its kindliness or harshness, without being aware of reading 'signs'. . . . It is obvious that not only poetry but all the arts rely on these responses for some of their effects. What we call the 'expressive' character of sounds, colours or shapes, is after all nothing but this capacity to evoke 'physiognomic' reactions. E. H. Gombrich 1

A portrait is what? A portrayal, a representation, conventionally an image, in which a person is depicted. The better question is: what is depicted in a portrait so that it depicts a person? Salient aspects of the person's physiognomy, certainly. Yet a successful portrait, one that elicts the viewer's response of: "yes, that really is such-and-such a person," seems to entail more than merely an adequate description of salient aspects of physiognomy. That this is so is evident not only in the case of caricature, which may well elict such a viewer response even though the image is substantially different from that which any possible direct visual perception of the person would provide, but also of images in general, inasmuch as images are mediated and conventional.

Of course, a representation is a re-presentation, an image and not the thing itself. Of course, any representation subsists in its material cause: paint or charcoal or bronze or terracotta or the dyes dispersed in gelatin of a chromogenic photograph. One may distinguish portraits that have a material cause of paint from portraits that have a material cause of chromogenic dyes in gelatin as consisting in the indexical relation of the latter to what is portrayed, while the former does not have an indexical relation to what is portrayed. But whether the traces comprising the representation are of photons on a light-sensitive material, or of a brush dragging pigmented oil across fabric, the material cause of the work imposes a set of conventions on the representation. That is to say that the medium mediates the representation of what is represented. This would seem on the surface to be merely tautological. One sees through the surface less readily with oil on canvas and more readily with chromogenic photographs, or, more precisely the mediation is more transparent in the case of chromogenic photograhs than with oil on canvas. In the case of oil on canvas, one may compare the image to a low resolution digital image, in which the image pixels are visible as such, and in the case of a chromogenic photograph with a high resolution digital file in which the image pixels are not visible as such. This is an imperfect analogy, for seeing a painting entails at once seeing an accumulation of discrete marks of paint as such and and as a face in the two-foldedness of 'seeing in,' as Richard Wollheim terms the phenomenon. 2 So also is seeing a chromogenic photograph, though it is a commonplace that the photographic image is conflated with what is photographed more readily than typically obtains with paintings. 3

The matter is not in the end simply one of material cause, even in the limit case of the indexicality of photographic images. Rather, the matter is one of the denotation of a representation. If a portait is an image which represents a particular person as such, what distinguishes a portrait from an image which represents a particular person for an end other than representing the particular person, and to which end the particularity of the person represented is at least in principle arbitrary? It is long a commonplace for artists to utilize a model. Is a representation of a model a portrait, in the same sense as a representation of N is a portrait? If it is not, does the designation of the representation of N as a portrait suffice to constitute the representation of N as a portrait? Does this designation suffice if it is made by the artist, in the title given the work as in Angilee Wilkerson's Mary #3? If this is so, does it still suffice in the case of Angilee Wilkerson's Olivia #1A and Olivia #2? Here one is presented with two ostensible portraits of the same person, which differ from each other; is one more a portrait of the individual than the other? Does it suffice that the artist has inscribed the representation with the name of the person represented, as Connie Connally has by scratching into the wet paint in the People I Know series? These various designations of the referent of the representation constitute a claim that the representation is a portrait. Verification of the claim would seem to to require the recognition of the identity, by oneself or an acceptable witness, of the designated referent of the representation. If such recognition by the viewer is a necessary condition for constituting a representation as a portrait, then is designation by the artist of the representation as a portrait even a sufficient condition? If the referent of an ostensible portrait is a person that no living person has seen, the recognition of the identity of the referent of the representation subsists in the recognition not of an actual individual but rather of a conventional likeness, a token of a type.4 Thus Angilee Wilkerson's Leonard and Christ has as its referents a person named Leonard and Christ, the representation of Christ being a token of a type. While the recognition of Leonard as depicted in Wilkerson's photograph depends on the viewer's knowledge of Leonard as an individual subject in the lifeworld, the viewer's recognition of Christ as Christ depends on the viewer's knowledge of a conventional system of depiction. The viewer's recognition of the resemblance of Leonard as depicted in Wilkerson's photograph to Christ as depicted on the blue car Leonard polishes depends on the viewer's comparison of physiognomic similarities, and especially the similarity of hair and beard, though also the more subtle similarities of eyes and facial structures. This comparison suffices to warrant the distinction of the usage of 'portrayal' in narrow and broad senses: the narrow sense of 'portrayal' refers

to representations of of existing particular persons, observed by the artist. In the wider sense they are used about representations of particular persons (objects, etc.) whether they exist or not. 5

All of this engages what one means in saying P is a portrait of N or, P portrays N. That having been engaged, one may have a greater understanding of what one means in regarding a representation as a portrait. What remains to be engaged is the affect of presence a portrait may elicit. If it is the case that artworks qua aesthetic objects generally, in distinction from mere representation, are quasi-subjects as Mikel Dufrenne has urged, 6 then one might reasonably suppose figurative representations, and especially a portrait qua representation of a particular subject would constitute an especially strong instance of the aesthetic object as a quasi-subject. Such an object would elicit in viewer response a sense of interiority, depth and presence correlative with that which one has in intersubjectively engaging a subject. In this, the portrait functions as a present substitute for the absent subject. That this is so is evidenced by the phenomenology and history of viewer response, underwriting the force-positive or negative-viewer response may assume, a force which belies:

the traces of animism in our own perception and response to images: not necessarily "animism" in the nineteenth-century ethnographic sense of the transference of spirits to inanimate objects, but rather in the sense of the degree of life or liveliness believed to inhere in an image. 7

That sense of liveliness transcends mere likeness, but rather entails;

the plenitude of a meaning. And the aesthetic object's inexhaustibility is, in the end, a function of its depth. This object does not exist in the manner of a thing which cannot be fully viewed in the course of a single glance but, rather, in the sense of a consciousness whose depths are unfathomable. Even the image of physical depth tends to mislead, however, to the extent that it suggests measurability and thus extension. The aesthetic object has depth because it is beyond measurement. If we want to grasp it truly, we must transform ourselves. The depth of the aesthetic object is measured by the depth of the existence to which it invites us. Its depth is correlative with ours. 8

Connie Connally is a Dallas artist. Recent exhibitions include: 2001 Biennial Juried Exhibition, McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas; 19th Annual Juried Exhibition, Pleiades Galley, New York, 2001; Connie Connally-People I Know, Craighead-Green Gallery, Dallas, 2001; Ulrich Alumni Exhibition, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, 2001; 2001 Art in the Metroplex, Texas Christian University; Five by Seven by X, Austin Museum of Art, 2001; 3rd Annual Face to Face, The Stage Gallery, Merrick, New York; W-2001 Mac Members Invitational, McKinney Avenue Contemporary. Connally received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Wichita State University, and also studied at Oklahoma University and the School of Visual Arts, New York. She is represented by Craighead-Green Gallery, Dallas.

Angilee Wilkerson has been a photographer based in Dallas for the past decade. Recent exhibitions include: Angilee Wilkerson, Phoenix Gallery, New York, New York, 2001; Angilee Wilkerson, Lago Vista Gallery, Richland College, Richardson, Texas, 2002; Dia de los Muertos, Bath House Cultural Center, Dallas, 2001. She received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Texas Christian University.

1. Ernest H. Gombrich, Meditations On a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1963), 47, 49.
   
2. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art [The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 21, 46.
   
3. This assertion engages a long-running controversy. See, inter alia, William Ivins, Prints and Visual Communications, (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968 [1953]); Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundation of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990, and "Transparendent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," Critical Inquiry 11:2 (Dec. 1984) 246-277; Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," Critical Inquiry 6 (Spring 1980) 499-526; reprinted in ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, The Language of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 219-246.
   
4. 'Type' is the class or general case and 'token' the particular instance; see Charles S. Pierce in eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Collected Papers of Charles Saunders Pierce, vol. IV (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 423.
   
5. Göran Hermerén, Representation and Meaning in the Visual Arts: A Study in the Methodology of Iconography and Iconology (Lund: Berlingska Boktryckeriet, 1969), 29.
   
6. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience trans. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 146 et passim.
   
7. See David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
   
8. Mikel Dufrenne, op. cit., 398.