Portraits / Heatmaps - N I C O L E P R U T S C H

Portraits / Heatmaps(#3), 2017

Portraits/Heatmaps (2017) uses a photo series by Austrian anthropologist Viktor Lebzelter, which he collected at a German Enclave in Romania in 1932. At first glance, his portraits appear to be typical portrait photography, with people depicted in mundane settings, in sitting positions in a garden or on a veranda. In fact, the people depicted in these images were subjects of an anthropological study intended to measure and categorize their physical features. Even though Lebzelter reportedly followed an anti-racist approach, the formulation of the issue at hand implied a differentiation between “Germans” and other “inferior” populations.

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Portraits / Heatmaps(#3), 2017

"In Portraits/Heatmaps, a specific feature of the photographed subject is outlined and furthermore converted into a pixelated image, magnifying and deconstructing the implicit mechanisms for isolating and outlining facial features in the portrait imagery, the invisible abstract mechanisms of the gaze that made possible the usage of photography as a methodological tool in anthropological studies of human characteristics in the late 19th and early 20th century. The artist works with the fact that Lebzelter used photography to observe characterizing facial features that were at the same time supposedly vital for understanding human characteristics, with the fact that it served as a lens for discerning its defining particularities. She exaggerates its own implicit principle in order to present it as a sort of ‘cutting’ tool…" - excerpted from "CUT" by Domen Ograjenšek

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