Adapting to the immigration laws that kept them apart, a local photography studio helped the Low family of New York create an impossible family portrait in 1961, by pasting in the faces of missing relatives.
It includes photographs such as Herbert Bayer's Humanly Impossible (Self-Portrait) in which the artist looks amazed at having apparently removed a section of his arm.
Travel is my favorite stimulant, and while I was writing " The Impossible Exile," a portrait of the Viennese author Stefan Zweig, hunting-and-gathering expeditions to Zweig's far-flung haunts felt imperative.
On the other hand, they take a long time to capture, which makes getting candids with them near impossible, and taking portraits an exercise in "wait, no don't move yet, it's still processing".
As a result, a full portrait remains impossible.
We three don't like having our pictures taken — we blink, we look down, we do all sorts of things that make a good group portrait almost impossible.
He died not so much a man without a country as a man without a world.Subtle, prodigiously researched and enduringly human throughout, "The Impossible Exile" is a portrait of a man and of his endless flight.
It's impossible to read this portrait of a man in extremis without agreeing with Virginia Woolf's assertion that Hardy was "the greatest tragic writer among English novelists".
So it is virtually impossible to corroborate the portrait being painted by North Korean officials.
Later in his life, he was bruised again when his enormous and painstakingly crafted masterpiece Five Portraits proved impossible to sell in his home country and went instead to Sweden.
