Saving Faces

Judith Harold-Steinhauser collects the faces, flaws and all, of friends and artists.

by Susan Hagen

"Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema … when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced," Roland Barthes wrote in his essay, "The Face of Garbo." He went on to describe her face as "perfect and ephemeral," with "the snowy thickness of a mask." A similar understanding of the face as a mask also provides the basis for a series of almost cinematic photographs by local photographer Judith Harold-Steinhauser, developed over the past 10 years using the faces of her friends and acquaintances. An exhibition now at the List Gallery is the first to present such a large selection of images from the series. All 28 prints are 20 by 16 inches and made with the black-and-white silver-gelatin process.

Harold-Steinhauser doesn’t flatter her subjects. Their best features are often hidden or minimized, while the timeworn surfaces of their textured skin or gleaming pates are gleefully highlighted. Perhaps wrinkles, moles, pores and stray hairs are the real subjects of the photographs, and the face is just a stage for all the action. In FF (1996), the top of someone’s head emerges out of a black background, illuminated as if by a spotlight. A tuft of thick straight hair is captured in exquisite detail, like Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf, along with a raised eyebrow and a tiny piece of forehead. We know so little about him, only that in 1996 he crossed paths with the artist. This individual, like all of Harold-Steinhauser’s models, is identified only by his initials, as if to suggest that his identity is mostly inaccessible.

Even though there are no names (and no costumes, scenery or props) to contribute extraneous meaning, all of the faces possess character and emotional depth. SP (1998), for example, shows the perimeter of the face of a bearded man disappearing into the whiteness of the paper, while his sharply detailed eyes have an inquisitive and forthright gaze. In JT (1999), the evanescent face and shoulders of a woman are covered with soft, delicate wrinkles, like tissue paper, while one eye looks directly at us and the other looks upward in wishful escapism. Another photograph, BJB (2000), reveals a very different persona: Here a hearty woman tilts her shadow-spotted face and a pile of dreads shifts to one side. Her eyes are almost hidden under half-closed lids, as if in an ecstatic trance, and there’s an outward thrust and a dizzying twist to the image.

In many photographs, Harold-Steinhauser creates the effect of faces animated by breath (using multiple exposures, flash and natural lighting, along with masking and planned movement). In BS (1997), she seems to capture the alchemical process of matter being changed to vapor, by showing several phases of movement. Here a view of a man’s face, like a bright half-moon, is covered with tiny orange-peel pores. His mouth, facing the viewer, seems about to speak, while his face is blurry at several points and his eyes turn away with a dreamy gaze. Harold-Steinhauser uses the same techniques to suggest the poetic transformation of other faces. ES (1998) shows one half of the face of a beautiful woman with large deeply set eyes, a little smile and long, wavy gray hair in exquisite detail. The other half of her face is covered with dark shadows and is strangely indistinct, giving the effect that she’s a benevolent spirit caught in the process of aging and dematerializing.

At this point Harold-Steinhauser has photographed over 300 individuals resulting in more than 1,000 photographs. Part of the fun of visiting this exhibition is looking for faint signs of resemblance to the people on which they are based. None of these masklike photographs could be called a portrait -- some are quite recognizable and others are completely transformed by this cinematic process -- but together they add up to a wonderful archive of brief moments in a specific time and place.

An Unexpected Archive: Photographs by Judith Harold-Steinhauser

Through Feb. 22, List Gallery, Swarthmore College, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore, 610-328-8488

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there