You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As a photographer and psychoanalyst, I have been intrigued by what makes a portrait memorable. How do photographer and subject collaborate in producing an iconic image? In my own work as a photographer and writer, I have explored the relational image, which can be defined as the new visual/emotional event created when two mutually vulnerable partners come to see one another in an entirely fresh way. This essay is a further exploration of the relational image, through a close examination of two biographies: Portrait of a Life: Melanie Klein and the Artists (2019), by Roger Amos, and Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer (2016), by Arthur Lubow. The juxtaposition of these two remarkable women, one as the portrayed, the other as the portrayer, provides an exciting palette of contrasts and similarities in which to explore portraiture and psychoanalysis through the relational image.
I begin, not with Klein or Arbus, but rather with Yousuf Karsh, the photographer who created the famous and iconic portrait of Winston Churchill in 1941 (Figure 1). Karsh, one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century, survived the Armenian genocide and became Canada's most renowned photographer. Karsh and Churchill were mutual partners in the
photographic endeavor, but with quite different roles. As Karsh (1971) explained in his recollection of the event, Churchill “was in no mood for portraiture and two minutes were all that he would allow me as he passed from the House of Commons chamber to an anteroom.” The photographer thought: “I must try to put on film a man who had already written or inspired a library of books, baffled all his biographers, [and] filled the world with his fame, and me, on this occasion, with dread.” Although he was anxious, Karsh responded with an audacious attunement that produced an image of the great man and became equated with the essence of Churchill. Karsh described the moment in these words: