‘Ghost’ Searches for a Soul

Is it possible to photograph the human soul? When a person’s face is recorded in a camera image, does it represent more than simple surface contours of flesh over bone? And what about the photographer: Is his or her living spirit somehow visibly tangled up in the picture?

These are among the questions pondered in a large and sprawling new exhibition of mostly European and American photographs of faces at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Organized by curator Robert Sobieszek, “Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000” brings together 153 photographs and mixed media works incorporating camera or digital imagery.

The aim is to look at the myriad ways in which relationships between the face and the soul have been mapped by photographers, artists and, in some cases, scientists from the beginning of photography to the present day.

The show is marked by an abundance of compelling work representing a wide variety of approaches, and it organizes a voluminous quantity of imagery in sometimes useful and often provocative ways. This is not “The Family of Man,” Edward Steichen’s sentimental 1955 tribute to universal bathos in photographs of the enduring human spirit.

Finally, though, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the exhibition is chasing its own tail, valiantly attempting to pin down a conundrum mostly of its own making. “Ghost in the Shell” takes its title from a hip Japanese comic strip about the mutability of humans and cyborgs, but the rather old-fashioned image it conjures up is in fact as antique as Descartes: Picture a ghostly, immaterial soul dwelling inside the mechanistic shell of the human body. Cartesian dualism is built on just such an image.

The survey is installed chronologically and divided into three groups: the 19th century, the 20th century through the 1970s and, finally, the last two decades. These groups loosely correspond to the prominence of three types of photography representing broad artistic outlooks: traditional, Modernist and Postmodernist.

Or, put another way, the show suggests that photographs of the human face can usually be described in one of three ways:

* They’re expressive, which means the visible outer facade reveals the hidden internal life of the sitter. (The photograph aims for truth.)

* They’re blank, wholly devoid of any trace of emotional or physical expressiveness, which offers the face as a kind of empty vessel waiting to be filled with interpretations. (The photograph performs an erasure.)

* They’re false, a deliberate misrepresentation achieved by the artist through the clever use of costumes, masks, distortions and other theatrical devices. (The photograph frankly enacts a lie.)

These distinct groups are not rigidly enforced by the show, which ranges among artists as diverse as Salvador Dali and Chuck Close, Diane Arbus and Edward Weston, Annie Leibovitz and Bruce Nauman. A few omissions are startling, such as the powerful projected portrait heads made in the 1970s by Peter Campus, but it otherwise includes a lot of impressive work.

Just how fluid or malleable the three categories can be is demonstrated the moment you enter the exhibition. The first pictures to be encountered are two by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), the great British artist whose theatrically lit and elaborately costumed portraits straddle two of the aforementioned curatorial boundaries. The somber, softly illuminated, downcast female gaze of “The Angel at the Tomb” is virtually Pre-Raphaelite in feeling. A false face has been carefully constructed by Cameron in order to reveal the true inner life of the biblical character portrayed.

Around the corner from Cameron’s pictures hangs an exquisite sepia portrait of a Hopi man by the Seattle documentarian Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952). Curtis’ 1921 photograph renders its impassive sitter as blankly as any self-portrait taken in the 1960s in an automated photo booth by Andy Warhol or a mug shot of a crook taken at your local police station. Through deftly handled calibrations of light, focus and composition, however, the figure has also been subtly theatricalized by Curtis--an aboriginal man shown as a powerful and immovable force arising into modern consciousness from an ambiguous shadow-land. Blankness melts into an editorial assertion of timelessness.

The early rooms constitute the most interesting portion of the exhibition, perhaps because the ambiguity of photographic practice is dramatically conveyed by images like those of Cameron and Curtis. This lively sense of shifting uncertainty is also marked in another, rather more peculiar way: As distinct from the rest of the show, a notable number of the 19th century photographs on view were made not by artists but by scientists: neurologists, phrenologists and other medical doctors of the period.

Indeed, artists are the curatorial touchstones for photographs of the blank face and the false face: Warhol (1928-1987) and Cindy Sherman (born 1954) anchor, respectively, those later portions of the exhibition. By sharp contrast, the chosen representative for photography of the expressive face is a scientist--French physiologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1806-1875). The 1839 invention of the new medium of photography had a dual parentage--part artistic, part scientific--but in “Ghost in the Shell,” the early scientific aspect is strangely privileged over art.

Duchenne’s wacky photographs of oddly distorted facial expressions are widely known from their publication as illustrations to the writing of English naturalist Charles Darwin. Experimenting on patients at an asylum, Duchenne developed a technique for delivering low-voltage (but nonetheless painful) electrical shocks through the skin to facial muscles, which would twitch in response. He wanted to chart a universal system of correlation between external expression and internal feeling.

The nuttiest picture shows a nattily attired Duchenne benignly grinning for the camera as he applies an electrode to the forehead of a hapless old man, whose adjacent left eyebrow rises in seeming response to the electrical jolt. What makes this delightfully bizarre photograph so compelling is that it pictures our own experience while looking at it: The photograph itself becomes a metaphorical electrode, which is dutifully being applied to the viewer’s head. Our eyebrow rises accordingly.

In other words, rather than the relationship between a subject and an object--or the elusive ghost in the body’s shell--the quality of our experience of the photograph is the true locus of its soulful meaning. When it comes to the mysterious matter of portrait photography and the human soul, it’s neither the artist’s nor the sitter’s soul that can be accessed with any reliability. In any encounter with a work of art, only the soul of the audience is present and accounted for.

* “Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000,” LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Jan. 16. Closed Wednesdays.