ABSTRACT
Portrait photography, almost by definition, involves the collaboration of subjects. As Douglas Huebler's friend Joseph Kosuth wrote, in a reflection upon his death, the people both made art a verb, not a noun: the meaning of a work of art is completed by the viewer. Like Huebler, Australian artist Micky Allan's unorthodox use of the camera as a vehicle for social encounter prefigured a more widespread relational turn in both art and photography, although in Allan's case, the record of a personal journey can also, as the title suggests, be read as a form of self-portrait. Even as photography is never the explicit subject of French conceptual artist Sophie Calle's work, and she often outsources the act of photographing to others, the camera allows her to play with the mastery of seeing and the experience of being seen by others.
