The metal is a deep reflective bronze-green, and the face looking out of it is frontal, symmetrical, and certain of itself. The beard is carved in tight parallel curves, the eyes wide and almond-shaped, the eyebrows arched in a way that reads across centuries as authority. Face, Iranian presents a sculpture from the ancient Persian tradition, and what Sernet's lens reveals is that Persian court art solved the problem of portraying power in a way that still holds: you cannot look away.
The metal is a deep reflective bronze-green, and the face looking out of it is frontal, symmetrical, and certain of itself. The beard is carved in tight parallel curves, the eyes wide and almond-shaped, the eyebrows arched in a way that reads across centuries as authority. Face, Iranian presents a sculpture from the ancient Persian tradition, and what Sernet's lens reveals is that Persian court art solved the problem of portraying power in a way that still holds: you cannot look away.
The polished, reflective quality of the metal introduces a formal element not present in the other Face works: you can almost see yourself in the surface. The face gazes out; the surface reflects back; the viewer is caught between being looked at and looking. This is close to what Roland Barthes identified as the punctum in portrait photography, the detail that arrests and involves, except here it is not a detail but the entire surface property of the material.
Sernet photographs this sculpture as he photographs all the others: with the same compositional formula, the same commitment to stripping away everything except the arrangement of features. The Iranian face is no more exotic to his lens than the French or the American; the extreme close-up puts all of them at the same distance from the viewer, which is the point. Distance, in this series, is cultural. Proximity is human.
