Portraits of Young Men
· · Thomas Gainsborough's Boy in Blue · ·
I learned that in your email the featured photo does not automatically show – it only shows if you go to the website. I will try and remedy that since for this week the match between the photo and the other materials is essential. 
Whatever the occasion – maybe a birthday – one day I came home from school to discover that my mother had papered the outside doors of my closet with old calendar pages. All of them were portraits by different painters, and all of them were ignored but one that had me instantly smitten: Thomas Gainsborough’s Boy in Blue. Love at first sight. Not clear if with the painting or the boy. Or the shoes. Not clear either, when that romantic streak in me disappeared, but I digress.
This week I will be showing portraits taken on the streets or other public places that try to capture some of the energy, the facial expression or the distant demeanor of the boy in blue and others like him. I obviously could not create the light, as the painter did, but had to work with the conditions that were present. That is a challenge but also the fun in street photography, you have to be quick, flexible, and in contact with the subject to get their approval.
Gainsborough painted this around 1770, partially as an homage to van Dyck from whose painting he borrowed the costume. The color choice might have been one of defiance, since Gainsborough objected to Joshua Reynold’s proscriptions of what colors should be used for various topics. The boy was a merchant’s son, not a royal, and the painting started a long journey after bankruptcy of the owner, ending up eventually in the US where it now hangs in the Huntington. Tidbits: German director Wilhelm Murnau constructed one of his first films, Der Knabe in Blau,completely after this portrait. The anti-hero’s costume in Quentin Tarantino’s Django, Unchained was also inspired by this painting.
Would he look like today’s photograph if only he smiled?
Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), “The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared.” His enduring nightmare, that America, with its notions of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, would be “gain[ing] control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man” was made real in 1945. In August of that year atomic bombs were deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 100.000 people immediately, 10s of thousands through radiation exposure later, and devastated most of the attacked cities. Current talk of “Let’s make America great again!” hints at a willingness to repeat this kind of strategic annihilation, and one wonders if and what we’ve learned from history, if anything at all; it also makes Freud seem quite prescient.
