How Photographers Used the Serial Portrait to Reveal Themselves, and America

As kids, my siblings and I would flip through old family albums and marvel over old pictures of family members in their youth. More than just thicker hair and thinner waistlines changed with time. You could really see an evolution of self over time—more confident, more resigned, more resilient—depending on the individual. In The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years, which runs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, through December 31, 2012, artists working in that same medium of photography show not only how they and their loved ones change over time, but also how America and its people have changed over time. The Serial Portrait serves as a family album of unfamiliar and familiar faces, but all related to us as Americans. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Photographers Used the Serial Portrait toReveal Themselves, and America."

[Image: Emmet Gowin. Edith and Moth Flight (detail), 2002. Inkjet print. 19 x 19 cm (7 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Charina Endowment Fund. © Emmet and Edith Gowin. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.]

[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for the image above and other press materials related to the exhibition The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years, which runs through December 31, 2012.]