Draft:Self-portrait (Patti Smith)

Self-portrait is a work by North-American artist Patti Smith. Her work includes poetry, literature and visual arts. The self-portraits Self-portrait New York 2003/2005 and Self-portrait New York 2001/2003 reflect this multiplicity, revealing an introspective and poetic approach to the image of the self.

The Aesthetics of Introspection: The Gelatin Silver Print Technique

The choice of the gelatin silver print printing technique, traditionally associated with analog photography in black and white photography, gives the works a timeless and contemplative quality. This technique, widely used by photographers such as Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, allows for a rich and detailed tonal range, suitable for exploring the nuances of human expression. Smith's choice of this technique in her self-portraits Self-portrait New York 2003/2005 and Self-portrait New York 2001/2003 is, above all, an aesthetic and ontological gesture. It is a deliberate choice for a medium that carries the weight of the modern photographic tradition, marked by the symbolic density of black and white, the fine gradations of shadow and the silent sharpness that invites introspection.

The gelatin silver print became, from the end of the 19th century, the dominant standard for black and white photography, especially in artistic and journalistic contexts. As Martin Parr explains, "gelatin silver allowed the photographer to control contrast and definition with much greater precision than previous methods, offering images with greater emotional and dramatic depth."

In Patti Smith's work, this technique takes on a self-reflexive dimension. The artist presents herself in simple compositions, often in domestic or secluded spaces, without adornment or theatricality. The formal austerity of the photographic medium resonates with the confessional nature of her literary and musical work. The gelatin silver print does not simply record an appearance: it invokes a time of contemplation and suspension, as Roland Barthes points out when he observes that photography "has something tautological about it: something was there, in front of the lens, and now it is here."

Smith understands this indexical character of photography – its "astonishing ontological evidence" – and uses it to question her own presence in time. She is part of a lineage of female photographers who used self-portraits as a means of subjective and poetic affirmation, such as Francesca Woodman, whose work was marked by spectral and silent atmospheres, also explored through gelatinous silver.

The tonal quality of the gelatin silver print is essential to this purpose. As Naomi Rosenblum notes, "the richness of gray values available in this technique creates a tactile softness, a tonal veil, that gives the image an almost meditative appearance." In Self-portrait New York 2003/2005, the density of the blacks contrasts with the washed-out whites, evoking an atmosphere of retreat that speaks to the artist's poetic experience, marked by themes of loss, memory, and silence.

This aesthetic of introspection has its roots in photographic modernism, particularly in the work of photographers such as Edward Weston and Paul Strand, who viewed the technique as a field of formal precision and visual transcendence. By adopting this same medium, Patti Smith joins a tradition that values the philosophical density of the photographic image, not as a document, but as a space of interiority.

Furthermore, as Liz Wells points out, "black and white photography tends to decontextualize time, giving images a temporal ambiguity that facilitates subjective and lyrical readings". This is evident in Smith's work: the absence of color removes the image from a strict chronology and places it in a zone of evocation, in which memory and dream operate in indistinct layers.

It is in this sense that Patti Smith's self-portraits come close to the concept of "lyrical images" proposed by Susan Sontag in On Photography (1977): photographs that, more than representing something, "express an attitude". In Smith's case, the attitude is one of withdrawal, of surrendering to the slow time of the image, of accepting melancholy and solitude as forms of knowledge.

In short, Patti Smith's use of the gelatin silver print is not a technical whim, but an aesthetic and existential position. The choice of material support is configured as an extension of his poetics of interiority, marked by sobriety, affective density and the search for visual authenticity.

The Subject in Reflection: Self-portrait as an Artistic Practice

The self-portrait, as an artistic operation, transcends the simple representation of the subject's appearance: it is, above all, a space for questioning identity and its displacements. In the case of Patti Smith, a multivocal artist whose career encompasses music, literature, performance and image, the photographic self-portrait takes on a meditative and metalinguistic dimension. In Self-portrait New York 2003/2005 and Self-portrait New York 2001/2003, Smith configures a type of visibility of interiority, in which the act of looking at oneself is not limited to the surface of the image, but rather turns to the density of lived time and the experience of subjectivity.

The practice of self-portraiture by women artists, as in the paradigmatic cases of Claude Cahun, Francesca Woodman or Cindy Sherman, has often implied a refusal of normative representations of gender and the traditional iconography of femininity. Smith, in turn, does not resort to the theatricality of disguise or parody – as in Sherman – but adopts an existential and sober position, which approaches the "self-performance of silence", as defined by Amelia Jones. The artist does not represent a constituted and stable "I", but a presence in the process of becoming, traversed by affections, losses and concerns.

Photography, in its ontology, offers a fertile field for this approach. As Roland Barthes writes, "in Photography, identity is no longer what I am, but what I was and what is about to disappear". This tension between presence and absence, fixity and passage, reverberates in Smith's portraits: her figure emerges amid everyday or indistinct environments, with rarefied lighting, avoiding any expression of exuberance. The body appears as an index of an existence marked by time, memory and melancholy – recurring themes in her literary and musical work.

The notion of "self-portrait as philosophical praxis" proposed by John Berger is particularly useful for understanding these works. According to him, "portraying oneself is reflecting on one's own gaze, on the distance between seeing and being seen." In Smith's self-portraits, this game of gazes is suspended: the artist often avoids direct eye contact with the lens, suggesting introspection or a refusal of objectification. In doing so, she destabilizes the visual pact that traditionally governs portraiture and self-portrait – the one that asks the viewer to immediately recognize the subject.

This operation is reminiscent of what Georges Didi-Huberman called the "surviving image" (image survivante), that is, the image that carries within itself a multiple temporality, which does not belong only to the moment of recording, but which is activated by memory, the unconscious and the expectation of the gaze. Smith's presence in these photographs is neither immediate nor transparent, but evokes a "thickness of time" – between youth and maturity, public presence and silent interiority.

The choice of photography as a means of self-representation is not insignificant. Unlike the pictorial self-portrait, which requires the mediation of a manual gesture and a freer abstraction, photography carries with it a promise of indexicality: it "went there" – as Barthes would say – and captured something of the real. However, in the case of Patti Smith, this promise is strained: the photographic gesture, even endowed with verisimilitude, is imbued with poetic intentionality. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau points out, "the female self-portrait is often a practice of resistance to the conventions of canonical portraiture, implying the production of counter-images of the self."

Patti Smith’s self-representational gesture rejects the spectacle of identity. Instead of offering a cohesive narrative of herself, the artist offers fragments: suspended gazes, rarefied light, absence of color. Her practice is close, in this sense, to the romantic tradition of the "figure of the poet" – not in the idealized sense, but in the experience of pain, solitude and time as creative materials. She echoes, for example, the self-portraits of Samuel Beckett, who used photography to capture states of withdrawal and silence, or the late records of Georgia O’Keeffe, in which the artist’s face becomes a map of resistance and memory.

Finally, it is important to remember that Smith develops her visual work in parallel with her autobiographical writing. In Just Kids (2010), she writes: "The images she loved most showed not exactly what was seen, but what was felt. It was as if the camera captured something of the spirit of what could not be said in words." This poetics of suggestion permeates her self-portraits, which do not seek to represent a fixed identity, but to activate affects and states of being in suspension.

Patti Smith at the Uffizi Gallery: Dialogue with Tradition

The presence of Patti Smith's self-portraits at the Uffizi Gallery, an icon of European Renaissance visual culture, is a gesture of museological and symbolic resignification. The artist's inclusion in the collection — notably with the works Self-portrait New York 2001/2003 and Self-portrait New York 2003/2005, in the gelatin silver print technique — not only broadens the contours of the history of self-representational art, but also strains the boundaries between the classical canon and contemporary practices of artistic subjectivity.

As Cristina Acidini, former superintendent of the Polo Museale Fiorentino, observes, "the inclusion of contemporary artists in the corpus of self-portraiture at the Uffizi Gallery has as its strategic function not only the continuity of the tradition, but the critical re-actualization of its historical significance." Patti Smith, in this sense, is not incorporated as an exotic exception, but as part of an expanding genealogy that includes women artists whose self-representational practice articulates introspection, politics, and poetics.

The curatorial gesture of the Galleria degli Uffizi has been widely recognized for its openness to contemporary art, especially with regard to women artists. Since 2017, the project "I mai visti" ('The Unseen') has revealed hidden works in the museum’s vaults, including female self-portraits by 20th and 21st century artists, which represents, according to Maria Vittoria Rimbotti, "a silent but forceful revision of the visual historiography centered on Renaissance masculinity."

Patti Smith’s presence at the Uffizi can be read as part of this movement. It is not just about including a woman among the masters, but about recognizing a self-representational poetics founded on what Roland Barthes called the "spectral time of the image", in which the subject not only appears, but bursts forth as "present absence." This conception is echoed in the Galleria's own curatorship, which states: "Smith adopts the gelatin silver print technique to evoke ghostly and silent images, capturing what she herself calls ;the time between words'".

More than dialoguing with tradition, Smith seems to "resonate with it". In her images, one can perceive a rejection of Renaissance monumentalism in favor of an aesthetic of the intimate, the obscure and the residual. This approach paradoxically dialogues with the self-portraits of artists such as Rembrandt — a master of the use of shadow and expressive interiority — and with the melancholic pathos of the portraits of Bronzino, also present in the Uffizi collection.

In this context, Smith's positioning in the gallery operates a rewriting: the artist inserts herself into a tradition in order to then destabilize it. According to Linda Nochlin, every woman who produces art in the midst of a system dominated by patriarchal structures "participates in a silent resistance". Smith’s presence, alongside artists such as Maria Lassnig, Ketty La Rocca or Yayoi Kusama — also represented in the contemporary collections of the Uffizi — promotes what Griselda Pollock calls "transhistorical interpellations", in which the present does not annul the past, but recontextualizes it.

Furthermore, Smith’s portraits, marked by an aesthetic of detachment and suspension, echo a spiritual dimension that can be traced back to the religious painting of the Renaissance. In place of the divine, however, is the human in its most contemplative and impermanent form. As the artist herself writes in M Train (2015): "Everything we have can be taken away from us, except the way we choose to look. That choice is our art."

The Galleria degli Uffizi’s choice to incorporate these works by Smith also reveals a political-institutional gesture. As Eike Schmidt, the institution’s current director, has pointed out, "the contemporary self-portrait allows us to reflect on the transformations of identity, representation, and the museum’s very function in society." The gallery, traditionally associated with the celebration of heroic male individuality, begins to include vulnerable, performative, and experimental subjectivities.

Smith’s gesture, therefore, is not only artistic, but also political. She inserts into the space of visual memory of the West a type of image that questions—and does not affirm—identity. His works do not show off or dramatize, but are silent, suspended in the contemplative gesture of someone who looks and withdraws. The Galleria degli Uffizi thus becomes not only a repository of past glory, but an arena for confronting the present.

See also

• Self-portraiture

References

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