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What's wrong with this picture? We're in a concrete block basement under a newish house somewhere in the suburbs. It's the kind of space where you might photograph a used car or a bit of restored furniture, which is why the woman reclining here on the cement floor makes a startling sight. That's the first wrongness. Then there's her tartan gown, a ruched and ribboned concoction so huge it makes her body look too big for the rest of her. Definitely wrong. Then there are the joke-shop teeth, slightly yellowed and set off-centre in her face. And the double dots of light on each of her eyes, which make it seem that a further pair of eyes stares out of each. Wrong, and wrong again.
 
The model has the haughty calm of a painted Olympia, and the photograph she inhabits has a confidence and scale that likewise echo historical art. But this composure comes undone before your eyes, as all those signs of unhealthy inner life force their way into your attention. The result is a kind of odalisque of awkwardness, a fierce and funny summing up of the thousands of photos in which someone strives for glamour, beauty, charm or sexiness but disastrously bungles the signals. They say artworks in galleries hear some of the dumbest opinions around, but I can't think of a better response to Yvonne Todd than the exchange I heard in front of this photograph, titled Frenzy, when it hung at Peter McLeavey's Wellington gallery in 2007:
 
'It's too mean. I can't look.'
'But you are.'
 
Meanness isn't a word you bump into often in serious discussions of portrait photography. At our most idealistic, we hope for the very opposite in any encounter between a photographer and his or her subjects. In the photographs of American Nicholas Nixon, say, or New Zealand's Anne Noble, the artists seem to meet their subjects on equal ground and invite us to witness the exchange. Their work keeps alive the old dream of photography as a kind of fair trade between the person behind the camera and the people in front of it. Look around, though, and wider evidence for this hope seems in direly short supply. Look at the photos in celebrity magazines, with their leeringly close focus and sarcastic captions. Look at advertising photography, with its catalogue of impossible perfections. And listen to the many writers who have expressed stern doubts about the survival of fairness and respect in today's frantic image market. What would happen, though, if we tried to reframe these doubts as possibilities? What if, instead of hoping for so much from photography and finding ourselves disappointed, we imagined the worst and went from there? What if we admitted that photography thrives on rancour, voyeurism, staring? What if we owned up to the fact that making art from someone else's likeness can't help but be a little vampiric and predatory? For one thing, we'd be well on the way to understanding what makes Yvonne Todd such a brilliantly bleak artist.

 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2008 issue.