B O O K
R E V I E W
HEARTFELT MOMENTS
Portrait of an Artist by Hugo Huerta Marin REVIEWED BY ANNABEL KEENAN
What exactly is a portrait? In art, “portrait” is generally understood to mean a visual likeness or representation. One could argue that a photographic portrait captures this visual likeness more closely than would a painting or drawing. It is also possible to create a literary portrait. Embracing this multiplicity of the word, author and photographer Hugo Huerta Marin presents Portrait of an Artist, a gripping book of candid Polaroids and captivating interviews with 25 creative women, including visual arts titans like Tracey Emin and Kiki Smith, and legendary actresses like Cate Blanchett and Uma Thurman. Created over a seven-year period beginning with Marina Abromavi , whose studio Huerta Marin joined in 2014 as art director, Portrait of an Artist captures heartfelt moments of self-reflection, as well as deeper, thought-provoking conversations on political and social issues. With fascinating anecdotes and insightful commentary, the interviews make the book difficult to put down. Reading the artists’ words and seeing their stories evolve is a joy. A highlight of the book is the interview with Carrie Mae Weems, which includes her personal account of making her most famous body of work, The Kitchen Table (1990). In this black-and-white photographic series, Weems acts as her own subject, donning different outfits as people cycle through the images, all taken from the end of a long, wooden table in the artist’s kitchen. A single light hangs overhead, illuminating the sitters below as they engage in moments of intimacy, sadness, frustration and introspection. Weems tells Huerta Marin how the photographs were created at a time when she was teaching college students. Frequent conversations about the male gaze in art made her question how young women were thinking about themselves. At the same time, Weems noted how Black bodies and Black women specifically were absent from art theory in general. “I thought about the ways the gaze could be focused, could be challenged, could be re-contextualized to bring in Black bodies…it was a wonderful endeavor. It was as though all the lightbulbs were turned on and I had a sense of clarity,” she said (p.108). In some shining moments of the book, Huerta Marin gives a snapshot of various periods of the art, film, fashion and music Above, top to bottom: Yoko Ono, New York, 2016; Agnès Varda, Paris, 2018. Oppposite page: Carrie Mae Weems, Brooklyn, 2018.
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