A detail from Robert Heinecken’s Periodical #5‚ from 1971, shows two images superimposed onto the same page. Neither of them has priority, and yet they refuse to be read together at the same time. The viewer flits backwards and forth between each image. They appear to be contradictory – occupying two separate worlds which have jarringly been shoved together. Heinecken’s message seems to be: here’s that, and here’s that: you work it out.

The difficulty for the viewer is made all the harder to ignore through the fact that formally, they are both very similar, yet in subject matter, they are total polar opposites. A woman standing in the doorway carrying a basket raises her head back as if laughing out loud. Another similarly grinning figure, a soldier in Vietnam, holds up a trophy of two disembodied heads. How could such similar and familiar posing have been put to use in two such different situations? The photograph of the model could have been taken from any advertising campaign or country fashion shoot, but that the posing was ever considered appropriate for such an apparent display of inhumanity in the picture of the soldier, must surely call the whole practice into question. It is beyond comprehension that an apparently casual act of domestic barbarism could have led to the making of a happy snapshot. There is something obscene about the mixture of posing for the camera, wishing to record such a situation (though many American soldiers in Vietnam took similar mementoes of themselves) and being complicit as a viewer on the receiving end, and thus completing a cycle of production and spectatorship.

If we reject one as false, then we must also reject the other. The suggestion is that meaning has collapsed and attempting to read such poses becomes futile. The universal mannerisms and throwaway conventions of portraiture have essentially rendered the practice bankrupt.

Portraiture – that sticky representation of an individual in place, in time – has often promised much more than it could hope to provide. The question of whether or not a photograph of a person can express some unseen aspect of their personality beyond outward appearances is at least as old as August Sander. Yet much of today’s usage depends on a belief that it can and always does.

The general assumption is, that with the medium of photography, looking at an image, you get more than an image, you never get just a likeness: you get a privileged and insightful look at another individual, on their own terms, as they really were. Standard portraits are certainly set up to substantiate the reading, making all features on a face clearly presented for unfettered analysis, or focusing on the eyes – the “windows to the soul”. A problem occurs though, when it is considered that conventional photography is only ever about recording a surface, and literally taken in an instant, the results can be misleading and flatly reduce any subject to a stereotype. Indeed, typological portraiture has roots in the studies of nineteenth-century anthropologists, attempting to link racial type or physical appearance to conditions such as social degeneracy.

Though such practice has gladly long since been discredited, a similar usage of photography has never fully been laid to rest. Today, portraits are used loosely in the mass-media. As illustrations, when they appear in reports or on posters, they need not necessarily contribute towards any form of analysis or understanding of the text. Most often, they seem to be filling up page space or providing a visual link between story and subject that seeks to borrow credibility from the fact that most photographs are still read as truth. At crudest, portraits in the mass-media can be said to promote a sort of continuing phrenological master class: here is the suicide bomber, this is the CEO, there is an ideal woman, this is what the man on the street really looks like.

One section of Heinecken’s work: The SS Copyright Project On Photography from 1978, presents a portrait which itself is made up from hundreds of separate photographs, each pinned together on a board. If looking carefully at a portrait involves asking more of it than is really there, then Heinecken’s piece adds a plethora of irrelevant and surplus data to analyse. The smaller images which make up the whole have been gleaned from discards picked up off the darkroom floor, pictures of the collage itself, other landscape or personal photographs, and several of the beer company logos with whom the author shares his name. The handmade way in which it has been constructed, along with all of the imperfections and distortions which push it beyond photographic veracity, contradict the mechanical characteristic of the medium.

It is more reminiscent of, perhaps a precursor for, a recent technology (though already defunct) used particularly in advertising, ‘Photomosaic’, the development of which could be read as a sign that single images are no longer meeting our expectations. The storage and recall opportunities offered by photography’s digitisation feed a considerable demand for portraits, at a rate which the West consumes at unprecedented levels. To compare our position with the responses recorded by viewers of the early daguerreotypes, who were even anxious to look at them and “believed that the little tiny faces in the picture could see us” is to realise the extent to which people are taking and viewing more pictures with more devices. Still images compete with one another on the page of magazines and manipulation occurs more easily, not just on individual images but in a wider sense, on a global scale. Portraiture nowadays is every bit as much about systems as it is about individuals.

Working in the climate of early Conceptual Art of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the artist Douglas Huebler attempted an interrogation of portraiture – or more broadly the photographing of people – by placing an emphasis on how a picture is made rather than what it looks like. Each of his so-named Variable Pieces‚ took the form of a set of simple instructions, presented together with documents of the result as they were carried out. The viewer is often left to grapple with the extent to which the authority of the text informs the reading of the images. That his best known project, Variable Piece #70 (In Process) Global (1971)‚ which included a promise by the artist to “photographically document, to the extent of his capacity, the existence of everyone alive” was, ultimately, unrealisable became part of its strength. Anyone can imagine the problems and pitfalls of the results for themselves in their head. You didn’t need a finished project for it to exist as an idea.

Variable Piece #101, West Germany‚ of 1973, features ten pictures of the German photographer Bernhard Becher, in which he had been asked to “look like”, or make expressions corresponding to, a series of professions or social types including Nice Guy, Old Man and “Bernd Becher”. In knowing how Becher was instructed by Huebler, the viewer becomes an active rather than passive spectator; left wondering how the intervention might otherwise have affected our perception of his appearance and left admitting a readiness for matching expression to stereotype. The photographs are difficult to read, not least because they aim at theatricality; but also because they clash with the potential knowledge that Becher, along with his wife, practice a form of Straight Photography. Photography that involves a typological examination of plain industrial architecture, which has characterised a large proportion of art photography over the last thirty years.

Huebler, for one, interrupted the simple view that in portraiture there is never a straight-forward, or even transparent, linear exchange between photographer and subject; suggesting that it is always much more of a complex relationship, dictated by a whole range of contexts and uncertainties which may, or may not, be apparent in the final product, but all the same. must be taken into account before making any judgement. By inciting a viewer to be aware of the circumstances in which his photographs were produced, Huebler suggests that similar forms of interference and role-playing are at work in any form of photography, but because they are not flagged up we rarely notice them.

Huebler and Heinecken’s work can force the viewer to look through‚ any line of faces, in a newspaper or on a gallery wall, and question what is really being asked of them. If you want to look behind the surface of a picture, you often don’t get the person themselves, but the system that put them there. The single truth of every portrait is really just of the situation in which it was created.