As They Wanted to Be Seen

By J.D. Reed

In Boston, a surprisingly revealing show of signed portraits

Photographer Edward Weston claimed that great portraits reveal "the very bones of life." He did not include, of course, workaday, signed publicity shots of notables (or hopefuls), the glossy eight-by-tens that decorate restaurants, offices and waiting rooms with ballpoint sincerity. Those bones are less signs of inner life than mementos of the cult of personality. What may be the country's first formal display of autographed pictures of famous folks is now on view at the venerable Boston Athenaeum in an exhibition titled "This Is My Favorite Photograph of Myself." The surprising result: a vibrant, affectionate show offering a smorgasbord of speculation for viewers, with hardly a glossy in sight.

More than 100 likenesses--captured mostly by unheralded studio photographers--range from the mid-19th century to the present, from Sun Yat-sen to Sibelius, from Gandhi to Garbo. They command attention for their uniqueness (Matisse on a horse), their rarity (a signed James Joyce) or their campy looniness (a bare-bottomed Mata Hari). All come from the collection of M.

Wesley Marans, 53, a Boston real estate developer who has bought up 5,000 inscribed photos over the past 14 years, many for less than $4 apiece. (Current estimated value of those in the exhibition: $97,000.) Marans' rationale for his passion serves for the show as well: "Signed pictures given to friends and admirers tell us how the individual saw himself and wanted to be seen by others."

The signatures are part of the self-characterization. Formidable, hatchet-wielding Carry Nation styled herself "Home Defender." The last survivor of the outlaw Dalton gang scrawled "The Compliments of Emmett Dalton," covering all occasions. General George Patton in pearl-handled regalia penned a cloying confection about his boyhood church.

The exhibition sometimes argues with its own thesis: often the subject must have selected a likeness to amuse a friend or cloud the public image. William Faulkner, who liked to characterize himself as a back-country farmer, chose a gelatinous, Hollywood-issue publicity shot, with only his pipe in sharp focus, to give to the woman who would become his mistress. The message Faulkner intended to convey with the photo--apparently taken during one of his scriptwriting stints--is as blurred as his visage.

Some great figures were caught by the camera before their legends bronzed. A young Senator John F. Kennedy, suffering a Denver political breakfast, looks warily, and even dubiously, at the surrounding petitioners and sycophants. Other subjects were all too clearly shaping their own legends. Gangster Albert Anastasia must have commandeered a photographer's studio for a week to achieve his straw-hatted, natty, top-lit look, which is that of a matinee idol portraying a gangster. Perhaps the best pure photography in the show is a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ordinarily depicted as a dour, moody presence, Stevenson gave a photo to a fellow passenger on an ocean liner that meets Weston's dictum: it lays open a vital and engaging face. A forefinger of his clasped hands points outward like a conductor's baton, and intelligence, so rarely caught on film, dances in warm eyes.

The sculptor of Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum, on the other hand, posed for a Rapid City, S. Dak., bulb squeezer and got more, or less, than he paid for. A bulky man, he scowls from the frame as if sizing up a landscape, and the shadow of his profile, grand as that of his own George Washington, fills the wall behind him. It is the sort of thing meant for a WPA mural. But captured with a fineness that Weston would have envied are hands that tell why this man sculptured mountains. Even though most of the pictures were printed directly from negatives, the exhibition does not pretend to present high points of the photographer's art, nor does it fall to the level of collector's kitsch: these signed likenesses are not commemorative whisky bottles or glass power-line insulators. Instead, the collection allows the viewer briefly to inhabit a delightful interim area of popular history, as if stuck between floors in an elevator with an assortment of charming and engaging passengers.

--ByJ.D.Reed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.