By taking on the job of assistant portrait photographer, she could slide into the role as anthropologist and keep her role as artist. But Herting always pointed the lens of her camera away from herself, which not only interested her more but was a fitting methodology for working as a kind of anthropologist.
The studio is a reflexively internal space. I remember that it is just as illegal to exhibit copyright photos, signed secrecy pact or not. After stalling by reading the Glossary of Lifetouch terms to learn that a Reno Plant is not a organism that sprouts poker chips, but the national film processing facility.
I am very reluctant to do this, as my entire purpose of being here is to lift as much material as possible and pan it off as a critique of the language of portraiture.
Skimming a long packet of materials reveals that my signature swears me to secrecy to anything that happens, belongs, or involves Lifetouch. The Lifetouch Associate information and benefits overview is for my keeping. In addition, Herting embarked on this undercover project for a more simple reason, perhaps put most succintly in the famous first line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” StudioĬarol has finally noticed me trying to look like I belong loafing in Zone One and has me started on paperwork. As Andre Tarkovsky wrote of bringing audiences through an experience in film, “hideousness, then truth.” Images programmed to be evidence of happiness or prosperity become painful, ugly or embarrasing, possibly revealing something unseen before. Herting breaks the rules of the studio portrait, and the resulting photographs no longer fulfill their role as social symbols. Artists disrupt and violate codes and, in doing so, bring them to our attention. When participating in this process we become blind to its constructs. The studio-portrait experience has a structured set of parameters that form a stylistic equation. Herting’s work questions what, exactly, we are documenting in this benign, constructed way. The portrait serves a testament to the subjects’ prosperity and personal relations, and yet, despite the time and care people take when having their pictures taken at commercial studios, the resulting photographs are rarely considered aesthetic objects. This was part of Herting’s investigation when she began the project. The ubiquitous photos generated from portrait studios reveal a great deal about how we choose to portray our relationships and ourselves. Nora Herting, “Wanted” (click to enlarge) How could this adult, imbued with inherent authority make such a ridiculous demand? I turn towards my mother, anticipating her to intercede, but to my shock, she smiles and urges me to turn toward the camera and smile … But I am not too young not to understand submission and an outraged and confused feeling rises when she then instructs my younger and chubby sister to straddle my back. The photographer, a youngish woman instructs me to lay on my stomach on, what I will much later learn is called the “posing table,” a carpet covered stage. I am excited about what is behind us, a photo backdrop of a field of daffodils and beyond a mountain. I am 5 years old my sister and I are in matching purple short-alls with little flower buttons.
#Jcpenney portrait studio manager salary series#
In order to create a series titled Free Sitting, artist Nora Herting got a job as a trade photographer at a portrait studio in a JC Penney department store in Ohio. Studio portraits don’t document an event the making of the photograph is the event. Nora Herting, “Carnation” (all photos courtesy Nora Herting)
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