Out of Character

A wide-ranging investigation of the interaction between writing and portraiture across history and cultures

Portraits often claim a revered place in worlds remote from their origins, but they also risk anonymity unless accompanied by written supplements announcing who they are and how we are invited to engage with them. Without such contextual information, portraits risk fading into obscurity across generations. A picture may paint a thousand words, as the saying goes, but a portrait, being a picture, still needs words to survive beyond its own generation. Tom Hare's Out of Character takes its cue from a diverse group of great portraits; among them are images of two Egyptian pharaohs of the nineteenth to eighteenth centuries BCE and revered paintings of several Zen abbots from medieval China and Japan. From there, Hare shifts his focus to a cast of characters from the seventeenth-century Spanish court and, finally, to contemporary images of celebrities from the multicolored carnival of Andy Warhol's screenprints. At the heart of Tom Hare's groundbreaking study—accompanied by an array of stunning reproductions of portraits—lies the question rarely asked: What work does writing on (not about) portraits do?