Group of Portraits

About

A group of portraits is a set rather than a single likeness: many sitters in one format, or one person repeated across a series. Courts commissioned sets of beauties or worthies to hang together, as with the Windsor Beauties Peter Lely painted in the 1660s, and El Greco and his workshop produced series of Christ and the twelve apostles, each on its own canvas. The format invites comparison, so small differences carry meaning.

Photography made the series natural. Thomas Ruff's large, deadpan portraits of the 1980s treat friends like passport pictures, and Nicholas Nixon has photographed the four Brown sisters once a year since 1975. Tomoko Sawada's ID400 (1998–2001) uses a coin-operated photo booth to turn herself into four hundred different people, and Kim Dong Yoo builds one famous face out of hundreds of tiny portraits of another.