Hand Portraits: Selection #8

4 - 10 April 2021

The hand, a dreaded style exercise in painting and drawing, became a recurring technical and symbolic motif from photography’s earliest stages onward. Since a shot makes it possible to represent the hand as a fragment, isolated from the rest of the body, the hand henceforth became a subject in its own right. 

It is the ultimate personification of an appendage, signing and affixing its digital imprint. On its own, it metonymically shapes its owner’s portrait. In fact, Berenice Abbott chose to represent Jean Cocteau, who was so fascinated by hands that he made them speak in his film The Blood of a Poet (1930), through his two hands harmoniously resting on a hat.