COVID-19 PORTRAIT: Isolation, Intimacy, and Elegy During the COVID-19 Pandemic | Ariela Freedman
What new forms of relation are intimated in the virtual spaces and faces of the COVID portrait? What do COVID portrait projects, multiple and various as they are, have in common, and what can they tell us about the shifting role of the portrait and understanding of the subject during the pandemic period? The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a resurgence and transformation of the form of the portrait as artists sought to navigate social distancing requirements and new constraints on their professions, to connect to subjects through windows and across screens, and to record the face of a transitional and isolated era. Telephoto lenses and portraits taken from across lawns and through windows navigated the space between the photographer’s exteriority and the domestic containment of the subject, while FaceTime and Zoom enclosed the face in a ready-made frame. The use of masks in public and the implementation of lockdown in private spaces turned the naked face into a vulnerable, liminal entity, both risk and danger. Durational portraits used live virtual posing sessions to establish connections between the artist and subject and collaborations between portraitist and subject sought to combat isolation and present the image as encounter. As elegiac portraits returned in force in newspaper coverage like The New York Times “Those We’ve Lost” series, artist’s projects, notably Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s A Crack in the Hourglass, used the portrait to create not only representations but rituals of loss. This paper argues that the COVID portrait mobilizes new techniques and expressions to record the precarious and isolated lives of its subjects and to memorialize and individuate the mass death event of the pandemic.
Introduction
Who draws the face of a transitional era? In this article, I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a resurgence and transformation of the form of the portrait. This explosion in portraiture came at a moment in which the visibility, subjectivity, and integrity of the individual was in a process of redefinition, prompted by the experience of self as entangled with others during a period of vulnerability and interdependence heightened by the pandemic, and at a moment of reckoning with ideas of individuality and the experience of mortality. As artists sought to navigate new constraints on their professions and to connect to subjects through windows and across screens, changes in technique and form creatively mediated social distancing requirements and channeled both isolation and moments of connection. The use of masks in public and the implementation of lockdown in private spaces turned the naked face into a vulnerable, liminal entity, at once at risk and dangerous to others. Even as the portrait charted the shifting experience of lived subjectivity during pandemic life, elegiac portraits gained haunting prominence, in newspaper coverage like The New York Times “Those We’ve Lost” (2020—continuing) series, and in artist’s projects, notably Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s A Crack in the Hourglass (2021), in large-scale efforts to memorialize the loss of the pandemic on collective and individual scales.
As Joanna Woodall argues, portraiture was crucial to the formation and articulation of modern individualism from the Renaissance onwards (76). In the modern era, the democratization of the portrait extended the form from an elite trophy of power and wealth to a popular form of testimonial, serving to commemorate the bourgeois family, the individual, and the beloved. Indeed, by the late 18th century Samuel Johnson famously wrote that portraits as testaments of personal affection were more precious to him than any other kind of painting: “I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can shew me in the world” (Boswell 132[RD1] ). As the form of the portrait shifted from the representation of the trappings of wealth and power to the attempt to articulate an inner life, it moved away from contextual backgrounds and mimetic techniques to forms of Expressionism and Impressionism meant to heighten individuality. By the 20th century, as Benjamin H.D. Buchloh argues, portraiture swerved once again, from the intensification of individuality to its critique as the influence of African and Oceanic masks on modernist portraiture articulated the form of the face while alienating it. As Buchloh writes, in the early 20th century the mask serves as a tool “in the dismantling of portraiture,” rejecting “outright the promise of fullness and the traditional aspirations towards an organic mediation of the essential characteristics of the differentiated bourgeois subject” (54). Though Buchloh begins with Cubism, he extends his point further, writing “the portrait’s claim for right of survival in depicting ‘the individual subject’ borders on the obsolescent if not the obscene” (58), and concluding that the form of the portrait is no longer appropriate, since as “subjectivity is destroyed systematically in the daily processes of consumption, it will have to become spectacular in its residual forms as grotesque or it will have to be represented in a condition of objecthood” (58-59). But perhaps, as Ernst Van Alphen claims, the death of the subject does not mean the death of the portrait. As Van Alphen writes, “the project of ‘portraying somebody in her/his individual originality or quality or essence’ has come to an end. But portraiture as genre has become the form of new conceptions of subjectivity and new notions of representation” (67).
The pandemic has a thousand faces, and the proliferation of portraiture in this period marks a shift in the ways that subjectivity is both pictured and imagined. Emmanuel Levinas writes, “the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation” (198). This article explores the new forms of relation intimated in the spaces and faces of the COVID portrait. In the ongoing disruption of the pandemic, portraits documented the many forms of pandemic life: the impact of living in close quarters and in extreme isolation, the sudden ubiquity of surgical masks, the newly charged appearance of the bare face. In an era in which the face is covered, distanced, and perceived as dangerous, portraiture takes on a new charge. Through surveying and analyzing a broad range of pandemic portraits, from nationally-sponsored projects which used the portrait to build morale and combat isolation to images disseminated on social media designed to critique the handling of the pandemic by governments and health care workers, from pictures that highlighted the individual experience of the pandemic to large-scale memorial projects that charted the faces of the dead, this article argues that the COVID-19 portrait presents a kaleidoscope of selfhood and community in transition and crisis and provides a picture not only of the people depicted but of an ongoing era. These projects, multiple and various as they are, grapple with the contradictions and complexities of representing the subject through the form of the portrait during a period of radical individual and collective loss.
The Portrait and the Community of Care
New variations, processes and forms for photographic portraiture emerged early in the pandemic. Portraits taken from across lawns and through windows using long-focus lenses navigated the space between the photographer’s exteriority and the domestic containment of the subject, while FaceTime and other apps enclosed the face in a ready-made frame. Specific conventions began to emerge: the visibility of the screen, the inset smaller rectangle of the FaceTime call, the black frame and simple toolbar of Zoom. In the suspension of their usual contracts, photographers volunteered to photograph high school graduates in their prom dresses or graduation caps, often alone in front of their houses. Photographers also took family portraits in confinement through the framing of windows or the shelter of doorways in “porch portraits” or the awkward new portmanteau, “porchtraits.” These individual projects, various and uncoordinated, sprung up as part of the informal civil response to the pandemic. Compensatory and creative, they turned the constraints of distance and online mediation into features of their photographic response, which was frequently presented not just as an attempt at documentation but also as a response to isolation.
One striking example was Seattle photographer Steven Miller’s portraits of friends and neighbours sheltering in place in the series “From the Distance: Portraits Under Lockdown” (Miller). The project began, Miller writes, as a response to his own diagnosis of cancer right before the pandemic. In the context of his own encounter with mortality, the pandemic spurred Miller to connect with others. As Miller says in an interview with Stefan Milne, the pandemic “took me out of myself. It showed me that my own fears about mortality were being shared with the population at large” (Milne). Miller found his participants through social media, via a call-out to his friends on Facebook. He took his photographs with a medium-format camera, a ladder, and a camera, directing the subjects through the phone. The photographs are a collaboration between photographer and subject. Milne invited his friends to “come as they want to be seen” (Milne). Clearly staged, but also decidedly personal, the pictures mediate the subject’s choices of clothing, props, and interior design, with the artistic direction of the photographer. Even as each photograph records the subject, the project served, in Miller’s words, as “an archive of his community” (Milne), a snapshot not just of a moment of pandemic isolation but an overdetermined period of precarity and transition—Miller notes that because of gentrification and economic crisis many of his subjects will likely not be able to stay in their shared neighbourhood much longer.
The window is the central constraint of Miller’s photography. The voyeurism of the window allows access to what Miller calls “the loneliness and the anxiety and the frustration and, dare I say, the horniness of folks being trapped inside alone all the time” (Milne). Nearly all his subjects are shot behind glass, both contained and on display, in portraits titled by their first names. Subjects present themselves in various forms of dress and undress, frequently looking directly at the viewer. In “Sarah,” for instance the subject is shot in the darkness and framed by the window and the branch of a flowering cherry tree in the front yard. Subtly lit in a chiaroscuro that shadows their face and reveals a smooth, bare chest, Sarah lies on their side, in the familiar pose of Ingres’s “La Grande Odalisque.” Topless and nude photos in the sequence balance individual privacy with the publicity of display: in “James,” framed by the peeling pink paint of the central panel of a bay window, a nude man with a big white beard stands in casual contrapasso, wearing only his glasses and watch and holding a coffee cup. The series also contains portraits of couples and family. In “Corianton and Keith,” the subjects appear in separate windows, hinting at division, while in “Paul and Mandy” textured glass bricks form a grid which reveals and distorts. In family portraits, the frame gets crowded, as in “Curtis, Greyson, Travis, and Ellie” where a toddler presses a palm against the window, as if to be let out. The portraits of individuals sometimes channel loneliness, but also chart the compensations of introversion: in the portrait “Surface,” a woman standing on a balcony wears an oversized t-shirt that says in large letters: “Please give me my space.” The glass of the window often serves as a mirror, reflecting the world outside and creating a double exposure of interior and exterior. The reflections of trees, foliage, and flowers allow access to the world outside the window, but also emphasize their separation. Behind the window, the home is bubble and prison.
Miller’s project is explicitly political: despite the stasis of his subjects, they perform their politics through pose and costume. During the pandemic, the desire for political action and expression was frequently in tension with the demands of lockdown. Indeed, the very act of isolation became quickly politicized so that people were frequently torn between the imperative to stay at home and protect the vulnerable, and the demand to march in the streets during the Black Lives Matter protests. In “Sick Woman Theory,” Joanna Hedva explores the “modes of protest…afforded to sick and disabled people” and the difficulty of solidarity while in isolation (Hedva). “Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and therefore invisible,” Hedva writes, rejecting Arendt’s insistence on a politics only lived in public. Miller’s photographs dramatize politics as lived through private lives. Leigh, pictured with their partner Venus in a bay window hung with string lights, wears a black t-shirt that says, “I want a dyke for president” (Image 1). Ekongi has an African scarf draped over his shoulder and raises a fist signalling Black power. T-shirts sport rainbows and slogans for Queer + Trans Liberation. In one of the more unsettling portraits, “Christian,” in a strapless dress, lipstick, and pronounced stubble, cradles a rifle. The representation of gay families, trans subjects, and a frankly eroticized queerness all assert a politics lived in and through private lives. In this context, appearance is political. Hedva asserts the urgency of protest through a “radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care” (Hedva). Through the form of the portrait, Miller documents and enacts queer kinship and a politics of care.
National Portrait Projects and Health Care Heroes
Portrait projects were organized by national and city governments, newspapers, and cultural institutions which held contests and challenges to try to combat isolation and foster documentation of the period. These ranged from small, community led projects to large-scale nationally sponsored efforts. Kate Middleton partnered with the National Portrait Gallery and aimed to “create a unique collective portrait of the UK during lockdown” (Hold Still), soliciting portraits taking in a six week during the first year of the pandemic, May and June 2020. The project attracted 30,000 submissions. Of those, one hundred were selected for a digital exhibition and were also displayed on billboards, posters, and community screens in co-op grocery stores across the country. The national and morale-building goals of the project were explicit. The organizers asked for submissions in three categories: ‘your new normal,’ ‘helpers and heroes,’ and ‘acts of kindness.’ The photographs chosen frequently featured moments of sentiment, resilience, and positivity: a toddler touching his grandmother through a window, two carers in a nursing home smiling over their masks. Even in the pictures which document adversity, the text emphasizes strength, persistence, and pride. Ceri Hayles’ self-portrait “This is What Broken Looks Like,” depicts her face bruised and marked by PPE after a three-hour surgery. But while the title and image suggest despair, the text underlines the virtue of self-sacrifice: “Looking back on it now, I feel immensely proud of the commitment shown by myself and my colleagues to provide safe care for patients, even in the depths of a pandemic” (Hayles). Though the pictures sometimes showed moments of grief and isolation, the impact of the series was to emphasize hope and heroism, especially among care workers: one picture of a hospital worker is titled, simply, “Hero.”
A way of encouraging community and celebrating triumph against adversity, portrait projects also became an instrument of civic pride and reclamation. In the project “Inside Out” the anonymous French artist known as JR installed photomats and printed and pasted oversized large black and white photographs of residents in spaces ranging from the old city walls of Taroudant in Morocco to the streets of downtown Montreal. Catherine Girard Latagne, director of programming in the downtown core of Montreal, called the images—smiling, black and white, pop-art influenced, with visible Ben-Day dots—“a way of reclaiming Montreal with this war that we have just experienced" (Girard). The photo projects were also instruments of urban revitalization, drawing people back into the deserted centers of town. If projects sponsored by national and city governments like “Holding Still” and “Inside Out” were more patriotic than the implicit but critical politics of Miller’s project, they still shared a certain overlap: the use of the portrait as a way of documenting isolation and of combatting it, of bearing witness to history, of asserting particularity but also acknowledging a shared experience.
As mask and face, role and individual, the health care worker exemplified the tension between the collective sacrifice demanding by the pandemic and the impact on individual lived experience. Images of health care workers often featured them in full personal protective equipment (PPE), their identity subsumed by their roles. The depiction of full PPE served a dual purpose, encouraging the use of masking in society as a whole and emphasizing the sacrifice and restraint of hospital workers. But masks could also be a constraint, contributing to the depersonalization in the patient and HCP (health care professional) encounter. As Erving Goffman writes in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the performance of professional roles relies on what he calls “expressive responsibility” (132). The sudden shift to full PPE, especially in the early months of the pandemic, might be characterized as what Goffman calls a “disruptive event” (152), a shift in dramaturgical practice which while medically necessary was socially alarming. Facial expression, a key signifier in the projection of compassionate bedside manner, was blocked, anonymizing the HCP and frightening the patient. During the pandemic, North American hospitals broadly adopted the “PPE Portrait Project,” an art intervention developed by Mary Beth Heffernan in 2014 in response to the Ebola crises. Heffernan’s artwork aimed to “reduce suffering and improve health outcomes” by making PPE “less frightening,” “personalizing the HCP-patient encounter,” and provide “a modicum of social bond” (Heffernan). At her suggestion, HCPs attached self-portraits to lanyards hung around their necks so that patients could see their unmasked faces. These headshots were implemented to provide “a modicum of social bond” (Heffernan). The clinician could present as both a mask and a face, protected in their PPE but visible as an individual through the incorporation of the wearable portrait. This compensatory practice attempted to return the appearance of personalization and care to the disrupted stage of the hospital.
Among the many subjects of the COVID-19 portrait, the most celebrated was what soon became known as “the health care hero.” Overscale murals of health care workers began to appear on city streets and hospital walls. The Arts and Heritage Centre of the MUHC, a consortium of hospitals in Montreal, collaborated with PPE Portraits Canada to construct large-scale mosaic portraits of three masked hospital workers, identified as Anh-Thy Le Quang, Kenneth Drummond and Geneviève Lambert. Each face is made up of 172 smiling unmasked portraits of health care workers, which together formed the image of a single health care professional in mask and face shield, each photograph serving as a pixel in the collective portrait. The mosaics exemplified the synthesis of the individual contribution of health care workers and their collective effort, a simultaneous portrait of the singular “health care hero” and the collective effort necessary for care. This composite portrait is an idealized picture of a health care service particular and multiple, reconciling the tensions between individual and group.
Interiors and Collaborations
While portraits of masked health care workers emphasized their role and public (masked) face, Zoom portraits opened up into the intimacy of the interior and emphasized the process of connection through distance. To take one example, in the “Mending Mirrors” project Montreal artist Valentine Abraham drew Zoom COVID-19 portraits, which took an hour or longer. The durational practice was key to a portrait project that documented the encounter as much as the image. She did not ask for her sitters to be still, writing on her project website, “as soon as you look with enough intensity you realize everything is always moving” (Abraham). Abraham called the practice “mending mirrors” to “honour the traditionally invisible feminine labour of repairing things that have been worn out” (Abraham). The portraits, not finished so much as what she called “saturated” (Abraham), were a record of both the face and of the time spent together. Upon the completion of the portrait, she sent the physical image through the mail to project participants (Image 2). “Mending Mirrors” balanced the mediation of technology with the affordances of craft: the hand drawn portrait, the physical copy not only posted on the internet but sent in the post. As Abraham responded to the pandemic, she used the portrait as the document of what Linda Nochlin’s calls, in her evocative definition of the form, “the meeting of two subjectivities” (99).
Though Abraham focused on figure and not on background, other artists incorporated not only the face but living spaces, in unexpected access to what Virginia Woolf calls the furnishings which “express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experiences,” and “the shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves” (177). In Brighton, England, the artist Nick Sayers began with social-distance portraits of people in his neighborhood and continued through Zoom to document sitters around the world as a way of charting the international effects of the pandemic and combatting social isolation. Sayers’ portraits emphasize context: he includes much of the background of the sitter as well as narrative accounts of the two-hour conversations had while drawing them (@nicksayers). The details of the background further furnish the subject, even as the conversation animates it. Sayers includes himself in the smaller insert of the Zoom screen as a reflexive reminder of the artist’s presence and of the mutuality of the encounter.
In contrast to Sayer’s hand-drawn, crowded portraits, photographer Jackie Russo’s remote portraits are minimalist and constrained. She set up her laptop on a black, draped plinth and against a black background. On the screen, her subjects look small, and distant. But even as the framing of the photograph emphasizes darkness, separation and isolation, the process highlighted connection. Russo writes,
Overall, I noticed that usually, both the subject and I feel better after a conversation about what life is like where we are and how we are coping with it... Ultimately, while the images show very clear separation and distance between photographer and subject, the portraits are still the result of connection (both human and digital), which continues to be a crucial aspect of life, despite unusual circumstances. (Russo)
Like Sayers, Russo incorporates text, introducing us to the subjects and providing a few telling details about the impact of the pandemic on their lives. Photographer Doma Dovgialo’s “Portraits of the Quarantined Mind” goes beyond conversation to artistic collaboration. She photographed a series of subjects under lockdown and then asked them to annotate her pictures with drawings and notes that visualized and reflected upon the experience of quarantine (Dovgialo). The resulting image merged the exteriority of the photograph with the subject’s record of their inner life.
These portrait projects widely vary, but their similarities are striking. Each were presented as collaborative, emphasizing the portrait as process. All the portraits emphasized care and duration. Many of the images were accompanied with text, introducing us to the subjects, meditating on the experience of the lockdown, or reflecting on photography itself as catharsis, creative outlet, or documentary. The images emphasized individualization and collectivization in what soon became a cliché: the idea that we are alone together.
Obituary, elegy, aftermath
The mass death event of the pandemic prompted memorial projects which attempted to register the immense scale of collective loss while honoring the individual lives of the victims. The decision to classify obituaries by cause of death foregrounded the impact of the virus, and aggregated the dead in a manner self-consciously democratic and collectivizing. Beginning in March 2020, the obituaries desk at The New York Times embarked on a memorial project titled “Those We’ve Lost.” Obituaries editor Daniel J. Wakin remembers being contacted by Donald G. McNeil Jr., a lead reporter on the pandemic, during the second week of March. “‘You should prepare for waves and waves of obituaries,’ he told me” (Wakin 2020). Inspired by the “Portraits of Grief” series which followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, “Those We’ve Lost” profiled the victims of an ongoing disaster. Set against a black backdrop, with photographs in an oval frame on the left and the name, age, place of death, and a brief identifying description of each subject on the right, the series prompted the viewer to scroll down an ever-growing list of the dead. The uniformity of format put well-known figures side by side with nurses, teachers, retired shopkeepers, board game inventors, Auschwitz survivors. “The purpose was to convey the human toll of Covid-19 by putting faces and names to the growing numbers of the dead, and to portray them in all of their variety” Wakin writes (Wakin 2020). While the reader could click through to the full obituary, the impact of the project was in the aggregate. On June 4, 2021, the Times announced the end of the project, writing that “the need to chronicle the toll has grown less urgent as the numbers have declined in much of the world, as vaccination rates have risen and as large numbers of people have returned to a more normal life” (Wakin 2021) though they noted that if there was another large wave of pandemic death, the series would return. Indeed, without announcement, the series resumed. As of the submission of this article, the most recent entry, for Laura Pels, 92, supporter of nonprofit theater,was dated May 9, 2023.
Beyond the newspaper, artists turned to the memorial portrait as a form of elegy in installations which emphasized not only representation but rituals of grief. Christian Boltanski’s last show Aprés, at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris from January 20th to March 13th, 2021, consisted of work primarily made during the pandemic. Aprés served as a reflection on a moment of salience about mass death and loss. Boltanski incorporated ghostly portraits of children from his own earlier work, projected on the walls. The floor of the gallery featured Les Linges (2020), linen sculptures on gurneys, piled, crumpled masses of fabric which evoked classical drapery, funeral shrouds, and the nightmare vision of draped bodies in the hallways of hospitals from the early pandemic. Boltanski’s use of portraiture and projection repurposed earlier work in the context of the pandemic. In a 2011 article on Boltanski’s recursive use of black and white portraits in installations, Van Alphen writes
By representing these human beings without any individual features, he undermines the idea of “presence” in the portrait of the individual. All the portraits are exchangeable: the portrayed have become anonymous, they all evoke absence. The portrait is commemorated in its failure to fulfil traditional promises. (63-64)
In an interview on the gallery website, Boltanski situated the exhibition in the pandemic moment, writing, “A very horrible yet interesting thing has occurred since Covid is here, which is, that death is no longer hidden. Death used to be completely denied by us, and nowadays, because of this disease, we are talking about death as something that is around us and that is present” (Boltanski). In this context, Boltanski’s usual preoccupations and materials "take on a new meaning in connection with the events we are living through" (Boltanski). At the end of Aprés, the viewer encounters a mirror in a reflexive moment of vanitas and implication. In Boltanski’s final exhibition a technique once used to portray the legacy of the holocaust and the haunting of history becomes a way to portray the contemporary elegiac moment. As the viewer encounters their own image, mortality is everywhere, and right now.
If Boltanski’s capstone project encloses the viewer in his own tropes and obsessions in an immersive, uncanny experience, Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s A Crack in the Hourglass, commissioned by Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, took a very different track, crowd-sourcing a series of obituary portraits filtered and experienced through technological mediation (Lozano-Hemmer). Lozano-Hemmer used a robot to reproduce submitted portraits of loved ones lost from COVID-19, drawn in variegated grey, white and black grains of sand. The artist posted video of the steady work of the robot, which took twenty to forty minutes to make the portrait and then erased the image upon completion, recycling it into the next memorial. Lozano-Hemmer explained,
It gets laboriously and slowly drawn, one grain of sand at a time, and the slowness is part of it. It’s kind of like a mandala, trying to create this sense of memory and evoke, crucially, a closure because the piece disappears after it’s been finished for a few seconds...We document it and make a web page for each and every participant, but gravity pulls all of the sand. It gets recovered and then we reuse it for the future portraits. Importantly, some people said, ‘Oh, don’t you think it’s kind of violent the way that the image disappears?’ Well, that’s exactly what a funeral is. It’s a closure. It’s this chance to see this image one last time and then help you understand that it’s over. (Smith)
As curator Drew Sawyer points out, monuments are frequently linked to nationalism, but this monument eludes being fixed in a specific location (Smith). Though it was possible to see A Crack in the Hourglass in installation, most people experienced the artwork through a screen, the way so much was experienced during the pandemic. These video portraits, which merge new technologies of digital imaging with the religious form of the mandala, are placed alongside source photographs and brief messages of tribute from those who submitted the images. “Sometimes an ephemeral intervention, something that disappears, helps you remember better.” Lozano Hemmer writes. “Sometimes these systems that allow us to create a unique interruption in the way that we experience time somehow help us affix or relate emotionally to a loss” (Smith). Lozano-Hemmer’s project is participatory, transitory, anti-monumental, and global. Watching the portraits dissolve feels less like looking at an artwork than like participating in a ritual of grief.
Despite their differences, among the portraitists there are pronounced common themes and strategies. The pandemic portrait highlights the tension between individualization and collectivization, emphasizes engagement between the portraitist and subject, includes narrative elements, and uses the portrait in relation to claims of care, connection, and witness. The portraitist also emphasizes process and presents portraiture as a practice which combats isolation and serves as a mode of testimony. The elegiac portrait continues this emphasis on process in projects of collective memorialization, pulling the viewer into a meditative encounter with the vast scale of pandemic death and with their own mortality. In this period of ambiguous loss and grief, of the ongoing attempt to assimilate and mourn mass death, and the open question of how to constitute individuality in the aftertimes, it may be that what resonates most in these artists is not portraits but practices which acknowledge transitory and ephemeral forms of selfhood, and enact new forms of expression, connection, and mourning.
Works Cited
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Ariela Freedman is a Professor at the Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montreal. Freedman is the author of Death, Men and Modernism (Routledge, 2003), numerous articles on literary modernism, trauma, comics and graphic novels, and the medical humanities. She is also the author of the novels Arabic for Beginners (LLP, 2017), A Joy to be Hidden (LLP, 2019) and Léa (LLP, 2022). Freedman currently holds a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada on "Representations of Pain," and this essay emerges from that larger project.