Any act of portraiture entails complicity, implicit or explicit. Portraiture is by its nature collaborative. Portrayed and portrayer must both participate. Both will reveal something of themselves, both will conceal something of themselves, to each other, yes, but even more so to us, the viewers-to-be. But the agency that is necessarily at play in acts of portraiture, while shared, is not necessarily equal; nor, although consensual, is the degree of disclosure. What is necessary– or at least what is certain — is that in the end one side will claim authorship, while what the other will claim is a mix of subject-hood and object-hood, the proportions of which are to-be-determined. Such is the pre-determined nature of the transaction in question: that it is indeterminate.
