abbey teller

During crit last week, I realized that I didn't have a concrete definition for a "blank portrait." After making another mindmap, I came up with social, political, and religious definitions. The social definition of the blank portrait is tokenism. The token characters do not represent a personality, rather they are a representative of their race. It is not who they are, but what they are. The political definition was actually the most clear to me. Visually, the best link is photographs of Arlington National Cemetery and of caskets wrapped in American flags. The dead soldiers have transcended what they were (people with individual characteristics) and became symbols. The symbols have been used in many ways, both as models of patiotism and starting points fot protest, especially during Vietnam, when it was still permissable to photograph all of the caskets coming off of the planes. The religious definition started with Islamic iconogrpahy and the inability to draw Mohammed's face. This further extands to the Judeo/Christian concept of G-d and the creation of man. According to the Bible, man was created in G-d's image. Therefore, the closest you can get to an image of G-d is the almost-image of man. This is impossible to portray.
After defining the blank portrait verbally, I tried defining it visually by creating a series of portraits of one of my friends and erasing out her eyes, hair, neck, shirt, and background (going back to a very basic concept of the blank portrait and masks, where it is lack of true emotion and personality coming through), and adding in portraits of soldiers who died in Iraq with their faces erased, pictures of people from various minorities with their eyes erased, and one picture of my friend entirly erased (in attempt to come close to portraying the religious definition. Hopefully, I will be able to generate enough portraits by next week to fill a small room.