17.7: Performing the Self- Portraiture, Identity, and Visibility

Contemporary portraiture often rejects the idea that the camera simply reveals a stable, knowable self. Instead, many twenty-first-century artists use portraiture to explore identity as something shaped by race, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, history, fantasy, performance, and power. The portrait no longer functions only as a record of appearance. It becomes a site where the self is invented, questioned, protected, exaggerated, fragmented, and reclaimed.

This does not mean that portraiture has abandoned likeness. Faces and bodies still matter. The portrait continues to carry the powerful promise that viewers are encountering another person. But contemporary photographers frequently complicate that promise. They ask whether the camera shows identity or helps produce it. They ask who has historically been allowed to represent themselves, who has been represented by others, and how photography has participated in both visibility and control.

Portraiture has always been connected to power. Painted portraits once affirmed the status of rulers, aristocrats, religious leaders, and wealthy patrons. Photography democratized portraiture by making likeness more accessible, but it also introduced new systems of classification, surveillance, and social ordering. Passport photographs, ethnographic studies, police archives, colonial records, medical images, and identification systems all used the camera to fix people within categories. Allan Sekula’s influential essay “The Body and the Archive” reminds us that photographic portraiture has long been tied to the management and classification of bodies.¹

For this reason, contemporary portraiture is often political even when it appears intimate. To make a portrait can be an act of recognition. To refuse a portrait can also be an act of resistance. To stage oneself for the camera can challenge the idea that identity is natural, obvious, or assigned from the outside. In the twenty-first century, portraiture is one of the primary places where artists confront the question of who gets to be seen and on what terms.

The portrait as self-invention has deep roots in photographic history. Artists such as Claude Cahun, Samuel Fosso, Cindy Sherman, and Yasumasa Morimura used self-portraiture and performance to unsettle stable ideas of identity. Their work demonstrated that the photographic self could be theatrical, unstable, and constructed. Contemporary artists continue this lineage, but the conditions have changed. Today, identity is also shaped by social media feeds, fashion imagery, biometric systems, online avatars, platform visibility, and the constant circulation of images. The self is not only performed for the camera. It is performed for networks.

The relationship between the selfie and the self-portrait is especially important here. The two forms overlap, but they are not identical. A selfie is often associated with immediacy, communication, and social exchange. It may be made quickly and shared instantly, functioning as a message: “I am here,” “I look like this,” “I belong here,” or “I want to be seen this way.” A self-portrait, especially in an artistic context, often involves a more deliberate investigation of identity, image-making, and representation. Yet the boundary between the two is not fixed. As Jill Walker Rettberg argues, contemporary self-imaging technologies shape how people see, present, and understand themselves.²

Artists working today often use the visual language of selfies while pushing it toward critique. They borrow the frontal pose, the mirror shot, the staged bedroom, the fashion image, the beauty filter, or the casual phone photograph, then reveal how constructed these forms already are. The result is not simply self-display. It is an analysis of self-display. The image becomes a way to ask how identity is built through repetition, performance, and audience expectation.

The body is central to this work because the body is where identity becomes socially visible. Race, gender, sexuality, age, disability, class, and cultural belonging are often read through the body, even when those readings are incomplete or imposed. Contemporary portraiture frequently turns the body into a political site: a place where social categories are enforced, but also where they can be challenged. The photographed body may assert presence, refuse invisibility, mourn violence, celebrate survival, or disrupt normative expectations.

This is particularly important in queer, Black, Indigenous, diasporic, feminist, and trans portrait strategies. In many of these practices, portraiture becomes a counter-archive. It responds to histories in which certain bodies were stereotyped, erased, exoticized, criminalized, or made visible only through violence. The contemporary portrait can reclaim visual agency by allowing subjects and artists to shape how identity appears. Visibility is not treated as simple exposure. It is treated as a right, a risk, and a strategy.

Zanele Muholi’s work is one of the most significant examples of portraiture as resistance to invisibility. Muholi, who describes themself as a visual activist, has created an extensive photographic archive of Black LGBTQIA+ people in South Africa and beyond. Projects such as Faces and Phases are not only portrait series; they are acts of historical preservation and political recognition.³ The photographs insist that the subjects are present, specific, named, and worthy of remembrance. In a context shaped by homophobia, transphobia, racism, and violence, the portrait becomes a form of survival.

Muholi’s self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama extends this politics of visibility through performance and transformation. In these images, Muholi uses their own body, everyday materials, dramatic lighting, and intensified contrast to create portraits that are both personal and symbolic. The works confront histories of racial representation, labor, colonialism, beauty, and the gaze. The self becomes a site of multiple histories. The portrait is no longer just a likeness; it becomes an argument about how Blackness has been seen and how it can be reimagined.

Deana Lawson’s portraits offer another approach. Lawson constructs highly detailed images of Black subjects in domestic, intimate, and symbolic spaces. Her photographs often appear documentary at first, but they are carefully staged. Interiors, gestures, clothing, furniture, and bodily presence are arranged to create images that feel both ordinary and monumental. Lawson’s work challenges viewers to see Black domestic life not as background or sociology, but as a site of power, beauty, eroticism, spirituality, and myth.⁴

This use of staging is important. Contemporary portraiture often refuses the assumption that staged images are less truthful than candid ones. A staged portrait can reveal truths about fantasy, aspiration, identity, and social performance that a candid photograph might miss. Artists use staging to show that identity itself is already staged through clothing, posture, environment, ritual, and cultural code. The constructed portrait does not necessarily hide truth. It may expose the systems through which truth is made visible.

Fashion and persona also play major roles in contemporary photographic identity. Fashion has always been tied to portraiture because clothing helps communicate class, gender, profession, sexuality, taste, and belonging. In the twenty-first century, artists use fashion not merely as decoration, but as a language of self-invention. Tyler Mitchell’s photographs, for example, often use fashion, color, youth culture, landscape, and leisure to imagine Black life through joy, softness, and possibility. His work is significant not only because of who appears in the image, but because of the atmosphere of freedom and ease he constructs around his subjects.⁵

Martine Gutierrez similarly uses fashion, performance, self-portraiture, and magazine culture to examine gender, Indigeneity, beauty, consumerism, and media representation. In Indigenous Woman, Gutierrez performs multiple roles: model, photographer, stylist, editor, and fictional celebrity subject. The work mimics the structure of a glossy fashion magazine while questioning the racialized and gendered systems that determine who is allowed to appear glamorous, desirable, or authoritative.⁶ By controlling nearly every aspect of the image, Gutierrez transforms portraiture into a form of self-authored world-building.

Diasporic portraiture often uses performance to examine the experience of moving between cultures. Samuel Fosso’s self-portraits, for example, use costume and role-play to explore African identity, postcolonial history, masculinity, celebrity, and political power. Although Fosso began working in the late twentieth century, his influence remains deeply relevant to twenty-first-century self-fashioning. His photographs demonstrate that identity can be performed not to escape history, but to enter it critically. The self becomes a vehicle for inhabiting and questioning social roles.⁷

Pixy Liao’s work offers a different but equally useful example. Her long-term series Experimental Relationship uses staged photographs of herself and her partner to playfully reverse conventional gender dynamics within heterosexual relationships. Liao’s images often use humor, intimacy, and absurdity to challenge assumptions about masculinity, femininity, dominance, vulnerability, and desire. The portraits are personal, but they also question broader social scripts about romance and gendered behavior.

Catherine Opie’s portraits likewise demonstrate how visibility can become a form of community recognition. Her photographs of queer communities, leather culture, domestic life, artists, friends, and families challenge narrow definitions of American identity. Opie’s work often combines formal clarity with deep social intimacy. Her portraits do not treat queer life as spectacle. They present it as complex, ordinary, political, and historically significant. In doing so, she expands who appears within the visual field of American portraiture.⁸

Contemporary portraiture also engages the question of circulation. A portrait today may appear in a museum, a photobook, a magazine, a social media feed, a website, a public billboard, or a protest archive. Each context changes how the image is read. A portrait on Instagram may invite immediate response, identification, admiration, harassment, or appropriation. A portrait in a museum may be framed through art history, institutional authority, and collection practices. A portrait in a family archive may carry private memory. A portrait in a protest movement may become a symbol of collective struggle. The meaning of the portrait depends partly on where it travels.

This circulation creates new possibilities for self-representation, but also new risks. Visibility can empower, but it can also expose. Queer, trans, undocumented, racialized, disabled, or politically vulnerable subjects may face danger when images circulate beyond their intended context. Contemporary portraiture must therefore be understood through ethics as well as aesthetics. Who controls the image? Has consent been given? How might the image be used later? Does visibility serve the subject, the artist, the institution, or the audience?

The right to self-representation is one of the central issues of twenty-first-century portraiture. For communities historically represented by outsiders, making and controlling images becomes a way to challenge inherited visual systems. This does not mean that only insiders can make meaningful portraits, but it does mean that power relations matter. Contemporary artists often foreground collaboration, naming, captioning, and context as part of portrait practice. The image is not isolated from the relationship that produced it.

Portraiture as resistance to invisibility can also involve tenderness. Not every political portrait must look confrontational. Images of rest, beauty, pleasure, intimacy, family, friendship, and joy can be politically meaningful when those experiences have been denied, stereotyped, or excluded from dominant representation. To photograph a person as relaxed, loved, powerful, stylish, vulnerable, ordinary, or magnificent can challenge a visual culture that has often reduced marginalized subjects to crisis.

This is why contemporary portraiture frequently moves between the personal and the collective. A single portrait can represent one person, but it can also point toward larger structures of identity and power. The subject is never only an individual, and never only a symbol. The strongest contemporary portraits hold both conditions at once. They allow the sitter to remain specific while also revealing the pressures of history, representation, and social visibility.

The camera, then, does not simply reveal the self. It participates in the making of the self as an image. Contemporary artists use that fact critically. They stage, perform, archive, exaggerate, stylize, and circulate identity in order to show that identity has never been visually innocent. It is shaped by who is looking, who is being looked at, what histories frame the encounter, and what forms of power determine visibility.

In the twenty-first century, portraiture remains one of photography’s most vital forms because the struggle over visibility remains unresolved. Who is seen? Who is misread? Who is allowed complexity? Who is made into a type? Who gets to author their own image? Contemporary portraiture does not answer these questions once and for all. It keeps them open, using the face and body as sites where history, fantasy, politics, and self-invention meet.

Footnotes:

1. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive.” October, vol. 39, Winter 1986, pp. 3–64.
2. Jill Walker Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
3. Zanele Muholi, Faces and Phases. Steidl, 2010.
4. Eva Respini, ed., Deana Lawson. ICA Boston / Mack, 2021.
5. Tyler Mitchell, I Can Make You Feel Good. Prestel, 2020.
6. Martine Gutierrez, Indigenous Woman. RYAN LEE Gallery, 2018.
7. Okwui Enwezor, ed., Samuel Fosso. Steidl, 2020.
8. Catherine Opie, Catherine Opie. Phaidon, 2021.

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