Thank you so much for the image date correction. I made the corresponding edit to that post.
Let me walk the portrait criticism back a bit. As the author of the image, you are the authority on it. If you say it’s a portrait, it’s a portrait—at least insofar as you are directly able to dialogue with the audience. When the work leaves the nest it becomes beholden to ideas and standards beyond your conceptualizations/intentions. In effect: how it is read by the audience is becomes equally valid.
I was—admittedly clumsily—arguing that given the definition of the word ‘portrait’: a likeness of a person, especially of the face, as a painting, drawing or photograph; and given the fact that in the aforementioned image the subject’s physical likeness takes up perhaps 15% of the entire frame area, her face perhaps 4%, this does not jive with the core concept of what a portrait entails. I feel that’s less narrow definition than respecting that words have meaning because of how they are used. Especially, in that context this is rather anomalous given my passable familiarity with the tradition of portraiture in painting and photographic traditions.
But what does any of that matter? It’s all so much word nerd rigamarole. “How it is a portrait?” is what I should be asking you.
On the narrative tip, ‘narrative’ and a ‘story’ are not equal or interchangeable notions. I am likely going to run afoul of academic narratologists with this but considering I am an autodidact dabbler—it is what it is. Again operating from the premise that words have meaning because of how they are used in the weave of life, there are two senses of a story. One centers around the notion of conflict. Having taken a screenwriting course in which students were asked to write a five page script in which there is zero conflict, I know people can get super fucking philosophical about how existential ennui entails conflict, etc., etc. I prefer to phrase it more directly: one sense of a story is does it incite in the audience a tendency whether exercised or not to inquire: so then what happened?
The second sense of a story is when one is taking coffee with an extravert friend and s/he says: oh I have to tell you this story and what follows is a nearly insufferable string of impressions, commentary and events that swim in and out of focus.
On the other hand, the word ‘narrative’ has to do with structure. A story told in a three or five act structure, is a narrative, for example. (Structure, the setting of either explicit or implicit expectations, is part of what causes the instinctive ‘what happens next question?’ inquiry.)
My definition of narrative is dependent on the first sense of the story— the question ‘so what happens next?” or conflict conveyed in a structured fashion. It’s much more difficult for a story in the second sense to be a narrative unless the absence or fragmentation of structure includes—eventually—some sort of conflict that is discernible after internal reassembly.
The sequence of events I suggested with regard to the image are linear—this then that. But there is not a sense of conflict. I don’t find myself asking: and then what?
To put it another less abstract way: Vermeer’s staggeringly brilliant Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window is unequivocally a narrative: what precedes is clear and what is to follow, at least initially, is suggested—much the way an acorn contains an oak—within the single still frame. Looking at the painting there is a itch to watch the frame, as if were one to watch long enough the letter might fall away from her hands, her head bending forward as she gives in to her massing grief.
Acetylene Eyes 