Name: James W. McManus, Ph.D.
Occupation: Professor of art history, California State University at Chico
Residence: Chico, Calif.
McManus co-curated “Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery with Anne Collins Goodyear.
Why I chose this picture: Duchamp, upon his arrival in America in 1915, was charmed by American culture, reading its visual and philosophical aspects into his work. First as a visitor and later a citizen, he wrote about the American fascination with machines; the beauty of her bridges, architecture, and plumbing. Also important to Duchamp was an emerging modernist material culture, whose representation he absorbed through his study of product displays, advertising and movies.
Significant in his unfolding visual language at that time was his “mechanomorphing” of the human form — translating images of man into machine. Organization of labor necessary to produce the volume of goods wanted by a growing consumer culture could readily be seen in Fordism and Taylorism — effecting not only a sense of the mechanization of the worker, but a loss of individual identity.
In 1917 he visited the Broadway Photo Shop in Manhattan, where he sat for the five-way portrait printed on a postcard shown here. The hinged-mirror setup, produced five images of the sitter — one being a portrait photographed with his back to the camera; the other four, reflections seen in the two hinged-mirrors. Carefully cropped, this combination of images produced confusion; a loss of identity. Which is the sitter and which are his reflections?
The camera designed to produce these postcards emphasized the mechanical aspect of the process, reducing the photographer to the role of “operator.” In the photographic arcade the camera was stationed before the hinged-mirror setup, the two creating a “readymade” setup producing like kinds of portraits for many sitters. The operator exposed the negative, processed it and printed it on photo-sensitive postcard stock, delivering the finished product in a matter of minutes. Duchamp, I believe, saw his five-way portrait as an expression of ideas and the visual language with which he was working.
If you go
“Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture”
Where: National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and F streets NW
When: Through Aug. 2
Info: Free; 202-633-1000; npg.si.edu
