The bronze is so dark it is almost black, and from that darkness a face materializes: ridged, weathered, with deep shadows pooled under brow and jaw. Pierre Sernet has spent more than four minutes exposing this photograph, and the result is not merely an image of a sculpture but a study in what a face looks like when it has been made permanent. The French bronze does not look at you; it endures you.
The bronze is so dark it is almost black, and from that darkness a face materializes: ridged, weathered, with deep shadows pooled under brow and jaw. Pierre Sernet has spent more than four minutes exposing this photograph, and the result is not merely an image of a sculpture but a study in what a face looks like when it has been made permanent. The French bronze does not look at you; it endures you.
The Face series proceeds from a strict premise: instead of photographing living people, Sernet photographs sculptures, arguing that the sculptor's distillation of the human face is a more concentrated record of humanity than the contingent individual. Hiroshi Sugimoto's long-exposure photographs of wax effigies asked whether the camera can distinguish the copy from the original; Sernet takes the question further, proposing that the sculpture is not a substitute for the living face but its more concentrated form, already filtered by a culture to its type. The close-up makes that claim with equal force across every tradition in the series.
The punctum, to use Roland Barthes's term for the detail in a photograph that arrests and wounds: it is the texture of the metal itself, the way light collects unevenly on a surface cast from a living face's impression. The sculpture had an original subject. Sernet has made it anonymous again.
