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In the 1990s a number of artists became known for making large photographs which exhibited the (usually young) subject as expressionless. Chief amongst these were Thomas Ruff and Rineke Dijkstra. While Ruff's work could be seen in direct descent from his teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher and their work with typologies, Dijkstra presented her subjects in a somewhat different way.

In 2007 English writer Julian Stallabrass published an essay entitled 'What's in a face?'  where he looked extensively at the social, political, historical and aesthetic make up of aspects of contemporary photography most particularly analysing the complexities of Dijkstra's work. He notes: 'Such photography... highlights an instability of identity, congruent with the micro-identities of consumerism, which the art world generally recommends. It does so... to produce...a realisation that we are all (as images) irreducibly alien, contingent, and particular.'

... This essay tests Stallabrass's ideas with particular reference to the work of a number of younger artists: Petrina Hicks, Darren Sylvester, David Rosetzky, Yvonne Todd and Loretta Lux. Stallabrass refers particularly to photography where the subject faces the camera head on and gazes directly into the camera lens and therefore at us; the subject is usually young and, unlike ethnographic photography, '... this photography depicts subjects who are not, at least apparently, strongly differentiated from their likely viewers'...

We have therefore two important antecedents to much contemporary portrait photography: one which while acknowledging the constructed nature of individual identity strives to capture a moment of transition or awareness which has an intensity we can all understand and yet its fleetingness makes it ungraspable. The other is intent in drawing us further into the understanding that what we are looking at can only ever be a fiction regardless of our constant misinterpretation of the portrait photograph as documentary reality...

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