Through a lens darkly

THE National Portrait Gallery has two concurrent exhibitions that may seem, at first sight, as unlike as possible.

THE National Portrait Gallery has two concurrent exhibitions that may seem, at first sight, as unlike as possible.

One is concerned with Victorian portraits of husbands and wives, the other with the use of contemporary media and technology and how they may affect our understanding of identity.

In fact, however, there is a curious symmetry between the two. It is true that the first includes other media: a pair of oil paintings, a pair of wax relief profiles and two particularly fine watercolours by Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the notorious subject of Oscar Wilde's essay Pen, Pencil and Poison.

But both are essentially about photography, one dealing with the beginnings and early days of this technology in the middle of the 19th century and the other, one may say, with its end.

Photography was, after all, originally a way of chemically fixing the kind of image that optical instruments had long been able to project on to a flat surface. It was at first a singular picture, before the invention of the negative allowed indefinite reproductions from a single matrix.

Almost two centuries later, images are registered digitally, so that there is no longer a negative. Nor is there indeed an object that ultimately is the photograph, whether single impression, negative or print; there is simply a collection of data that can be viewed on a screen, modified, stored and printed off as what is tellingly called a hard copy.

In the process, photography's claim to absolute veracity has been radically undermined; the camera may not lie, but those who manipulate the image on screens do little else. The business of artificial glamour is so vast that it has spawned an equally spurious market for pictures in which the beautiful people are caught off guard, in the supposed authenticity of ugliness.

Equally importantly, these digital images can now be taken by devices capable of transmitting them instantly. A picture taken on a mobile phone -- often in a moment of indiscretion -- can be sent seconds later to one or more recipients, who can store it, post it on a website or retransmit it.

Young people, especially, mimic the larger economy of the image that surrounds them on every side, and find in social-networking sites the opportunity to make themselves visible in a similar way, unaware that they are venturing into a morass of narcissism, exhibitionism and voyeurism, and publishing material that can never be withdrawn from circulation.

The world of the beginnings of photography was a very different one, in which most people had no pictures of themselves or their families, and the features of the dead lived on for no more than a generation in the memories of those who had loved them.

Families were naturally the most important subjects for the new technology, especially when infant mortality was still so high, and when childbirth, especially the first time, could so easily be fatal for a young woman. The great movements of emigration in the 19th century must have played a part, too: those who left home for a new life at the ends of the earth would most likely never again see those they had left behind.

The first commercial method for fixing a light-imprinted image was the daguerreotype -- patented by its inventor Louis Daguerre in 1839 -- which involved a single impression on a copper plate coated with a photosensitive silver chloride solution.

There are several examples in the exhibition: they must have seemed extraordinary at the time, but they are small and hard to see because of the reflective silver backing. Being unique, they are also as irreplaceable as a drawing, carefully preserved in little frames or boxes.

Within a few years, there was a new technology, the ambrotype or collodion print, which was still a unique impression, but fixed on a glass plate treated with a collodion solution and with a backing of black cloth or paper, so that it was free of the reflective surface of the daguerreotype.

Further improvements followed. From the 1850s, the glass negative -- superseding William Fox Talbot's earlier paper negatives -- completely changed the photographic image by allowing multiple impressions to be taken; henceforth copies of photographs could be distributed or swapped with friends and relations, and could be used, like the carte de visite, for publicity and self-promotion. The very early photographs in the exhibition, when such images were still expensive, are almost all of known individuals, often substantial figures in the commercial and political life of the colonies, whose lives and careers are well documented, such as members of the Mort family.

Some of the images are in themselves rather dull; respectable couples in their Sunday best, of whom we read that he founded some enterprise or other and that she had a number of children, but whose character and experience remains essentially unfathomable.

There are a few more interesting cases, like the pair of Dr Lindsay and his young wife Jane, probably around the time she was married at the age of 19. She looks a rather shy girl, awkward and graceless as she leans against a rustic studio prop; he is staid and rather Victorian at first sight, with something of the faun or satyr on closer inspection.

But we meet Jane again in another picture, this time as a little girl in the large family of Thomas Williams, who had been a missionary in Fiji for many years before returning to settle near Ballarat. Here, smiling and relaxed as she stands beside her father, she seems much livelier. And we begin to understand how she and Dr Lindsay could have been the parents of the talented and bohemian Lindsay children, Norman and his brothers and sisters.

The story of the Lindsays, incidentally, continues in the main gallery, with a little display case containing a photograph of all the siblings as young adults, as well as a photograph of the beautiful Rose Lindsay at about 18, in fancy dress with Will Dyson; fancy dress meaning a loin cloth in his case and nothing in hers.

The second exhibition is rather disappointing, both in the standard of work and in the lack of any clear point behind the choice and presentation of the exhibits. One struggles to find any piece that is memorable or even particularly interesting, let alone anything that touches the imagination more deeply. A set of digital animation heads printed on canvas at the end sums up part of the problem. This kind of thing has its proper existence in motion, in transience, in its own medium; printing on to canvas turns them into kitsch and has no justification other than the production of a saleable commodity.

There are some extremely dull videos, including one of a set of heads with expressions changing in slow motion, as though it were a revelation to demonstrate that the face has a lot of highly specialised muscles for this purpose. And far from revealing the complexity of inner life, these grimaces are devoid of psychological motivation and thus completely superficial.

Even sillier is one in which, when I was there, a young woman put on a motorcycle helmet and then took it off again, observing that it was hot; perhaps there are other more rewarding episodes if one has nothing better to do than wait for them.

Worst of all, though, is a dreadful piece by Rineke Dijkstra, of girls dancing in a desultory way against a white backdrop; we don't really need this to understand that teenage girls dancing in nightclubs may be alienated, and meanwhile the invasive disco music from this room makes half the exhibition unbearable.

The sum of aesthetic or intellectual nourishment from these displays is pitifully scanty. More interesting are a couple of three-dimensional works, an anamorphic skull by Robert Lazzarini, and a small figure of a man, reproduced in a clay-like material by a 3-D digital printer and coloured in monochrome.

The trouble is that these are still demonstrations of what the new technology can do, rather than works that employ that technology to shape some insight that is intrinsically valuable.

One of the few works that does speak to the imagination is Petrina Hicks's revolving bust of an impassive girl with smoke issuing from her lips like a departing spirit. Other works are gratuitous, like Justine Khamara's pictures of her parents -- singularly unflattering -- printed on to sheets of metal that are cut and opened out like a children's game with paper cut-outs, or indeed Stelarc's face expanded on to a tabletop. Khaled Sabsabi's banks of monitors, on which different eyes, noses and mouths succeed each other in a constant random reconfiguration, may be intended to make some point about universal humanity and diversity, but the fragmentation of the facial features is misconceived. It echoes instead the massification of contemporary humanity, and the result is alienated, anti-humanistic and even nihilistic.

Almost the only work that actually claims a deeper attention is by Chuck Close, better known as a hyper-realist painter, but here experimenting with a return to the daguerreotype. There are some small self-portraits, and a pair of headless male and female nudes, seen from front and back.

Close plays with the instability of an image that is both absolutely clear and in one sense irrefutable as a direct and unique imprint of the real world, and yet also elusive, because of the reflective silver surface in which the viewer's own image can suddenly replace that of the motif.

Patrick Pound's mobile phone pictures are also suggestively ineffable, but on the whole it was a pleasure to leave Present Tense and revisit the main collection. Fascinating as the best photography can be, painting has resources in the depiction of human character that remain incomparable.

This is especially true when one recalls the little portraits in Husbands and Wives, whose limitations have already been mentioned. Most of them are dry little records of facial features with no sense at all of the character and personality within; undeniably likenesses, but hardly life-like.

Look, in contrast, at a painted portrait of around the same period, such as William Strutt's deliberately titled Portrait of John Fawkner, Founder of Melbourne (1856). The vivid sense of the man's character comes from the living connection between sitter and artist; it is not an imprint of his features but an interpretation of his whole being.

Of course this is considering photography in its infancy, but the distinctive qualities of painting are clear, from the middle of the 20th century, if one takes a wall at random, with a sequence of reasonably able painters, from William Dargie to Grace Cossington-Smith.

Every mark is significant, and records something seen and felt; intellect and intuition are one and become simultaneous with making.

A little further on is a new acquisition, the Self-portrait (c.1930) of Percy Leason, one of Max Meldrum's most important pupils. Leason is not a great painter, but the self-portrait is arresting; one can easily imagine a photograph in the same attitude, but it would be mute in comparison.

These questions are relevant even when considering the greatest photography, and much more so in the age of the continuous flow of random photographic imagery.

The attraction is still the same, the promise of immediacy and reality; and the problem is still the same too, that humans are not ultimately machine-readable.