In the faces of these photographic subjects we behold an alarming look of knowledge without consent, and the formal elements associated with this type of portrait — the rigid, head-on stare, the non-professional lighting and institutional accouterment — are charged with the candid photo's shock of spontaneous revelation.
The process involves a 15-minute scan with a handheld scanner, during which the subject must stay completely still, in the manner of early portrait photography – no doubt resulting in similarly rigid poses and fixed stares.
Nonetheless, he's created an absorbing, fleshed-out portrait of an American male edging toward adulthood by crossing seemingly rigid social boundaries.
As in his Italian portraits, full-length renderings prevail, but his English patrons seem more rigid and, as a rule, more prosaic than their Latin counterparts.
In the play, the Prozorov sisters love being photographed, so Mitchell projects these family portraits on to the backcloth, making us realise that our own ancestors, rigid in their Sunday best, were probably bursting with equal passion and despair.
A small, finely worked painting by James Bard, the artist best known for portraits of mid-19th-century steamboats, pictures a man and his enormous horse in rigid profile.
The criticism, mostly ideological, rigid and hidebound (ie very 1975), was pretty rich, considering that Albert and David Maysles' masterly 1969 documentary, Salesman, a haunting and bleak portrait of four blue-collar door-to-door bible-peddlers, was the apotheosis of direct cinema.
He invites us to look again at the essential characteristics of traditional, idealising portrait sculpture of the kind that was common to the Greeks, the Romans, Michelangelo, Rodin, and is still the norm today in rigid, academicising circles.
Retirement scares him rigid.
