Following my ealier journal Unbearable Lightness expanded on it in her blog [link] stimulating a very interesting discussion, which I truly appreciate (thanks UL for your thoughtful comments). Joseph Crachiola in his comment posted on UL's blog quoted Richard Avedon and I would like to repeat the quote here as it really strikes a chord
"A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion .... All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."
Still, many photographers would like to hang on to the idea of the truth of the moment. And surely in the moment of a shot there is a truth, though not necessarily The Truth. My post was not so much about this notion of truth, it was more about the model and what she thinks and does. About the model as subject, the model's performance. There is a link, no doubt, to the discussion on art and artifice developed by UL, but my question remains slightly different.
Sometimes answers come to us unexpectedly, totally out of the blue.
Quite accidentally I came across the self-portraits by Vera von Lehndorff, while googling something else. Vera Lehndorff otherwise known as Veruschka was famous in the 1960s for being one of the first supermodels. Very tall and striking she worked with Avedon and Penn and graced endless magazine covers till she turned her back on fashion following a quarrel with a Vogue editor who wanted her to "update" her look. And she began a new career as an installation artist and body painter. More recently,she collaborated with a photographer, Andreas Hubertus Ilse, on a series of self-portraits performed by her, a "retrospective revitalization of her alter ego Veruschka". I cannot post any thumbnail from the exhibition but you can visit the online gallery here [link] and be truly amazed.
I think this is the first time that I have ever come across an official acknowledgment of the model as performer. Verouschka has done much to bring back attention to the notion of the model as subject. As Gary Indiana writes, in his 2008 interview with Veruschka "great models can be all things to all people. Veruschka is a true artist because she can be all things all by herself" [link]

I am a member of
I am a member of club
I am a member of
I am a member of