A portrait by Dorthea Lange from 1935.

“We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.”
– Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt

Eisenstaedt’s observation seems especially true of photographic portraiture. The light may shift over a landscape, but the rocks below will remain cooperatively unchanged. A flower holds a pose very well. The human face, however, is never at rest. From nanosecond to nanosecond, a shift of the eye or the flare of a nostril will alter the look of a face immeasurably. While a painter can abstract a look from the thousands that flit by during a sitting, a photographer must choose a single moment in which to click the shutter.

Which makes the premise of the exhibition “Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture” at Phoenix Art Museum particularly compelling. How do different photographers make choices regarding their subjects? And what were the relationships between the sitters and such famous photographers as Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Yosuf Karsh and Richard Avedon? Rebecca Senf, Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography for Phoenix Art Museum, promises that “Face to Face” will provide some answers to these questions.

The exhibition, which opens Sept. 19, features 70 images, many of them from the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. For more information, go here.