ENTRY DESCRIPTION
"As Peggy Phelan describes in "The Unmarked," posing for a portrait is a process whereby one performs an identity that one believes others expect to see. Uncertain about what the body looks like or how substantial it is, we perform, Phelan says, "an image of it by imitating what we think we look like. We imagine what people might see when they look at us, and then we try to perform (and conform to) those images. . . The imitative reproduction of the self-image always involves a detour through the eye of the other." Ideally, artist and sitter collaborate to produce an image that reflects what the sitter hoped to project to the world. However, in some cases, as in Brant's, the sitter has less control over the artist's rendering of an image, as he or she is not the patron, the one, because paying for the portrait, whom the artist must ultimately please."

From 'Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting' (1999), by Beth Fowkes Tobin

AUTHOR
Sophie-Luise Passow (*1994, Vienna) studied photography in the class of German artist Gabriele Rothemann and graphics and printmaking with Swedish artist Jan Svenungsson at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.
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Urte Laukaityte (*1992, Vilnius) was educated at the University of Cambridge for her BA, attained her MSc at the University of Edinburgh, and is a PhD researcher at UC Berkeley. Urte spent the year 2022/23 as a Solitude fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude.
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Ursa Majeure (*2023, Stuttgart) was born Athena-style from the combined heads of a two-part organism wandering the forests around a 1700s schloss. If experience were summative, she would have a three-decade long photographic career by now, despite being birthed in January of last year. She has grand plans for her future as a photographer, including experimenting with different techniques—state-of-the-art as well as historical. A crucial feature of her practice is the symbiosis of photography and text, or, more broadly, the fusion of art and science—the perennial holy grail of contemporality.

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