Photographing the Psyche | Lucy McKeon | The New York Review of Books

Sternberger Photographs/Stephan Loewentheil, 2015/Frida Kahlo Corporation/Skira Rizzoli
Photograph of Diego Rivera and Marcel Sternberger, Mexico, 1952

What can a photograph tell us about the interior life of its subject? During photography’s early days in the mid-nineteenth century, the photographic portrait was often expected to convey a certain neutrality. Long exposure times required stillness, while the prevalent study of physiognomy, in which facial features were believed to reveal character traits, made some think that visible emotion would undermine the accuracy of a portrait’s static likeness. But with technological advances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some photographers began experimenting with pathognomic portraits—photographs that were meant to capture an individual’s particular expressions, with the implication that emotional expression might better convey the character, personality, or essence of a subject.

The photographs of Marcel Sternberger (1899-1956)—the focus of historian Jacob Loewentheil’s new book, The Psychological Portrait: Marcel Sternberger’s Revelations in Photography—exemplify this approach. Sternberger, whose career spanned the 1930s to the 1950s, was a leading portrait photographer of his generation. “One might argue that there is hardly a more recognizable portraitist in the history of photography,” writes Phillip Prodger, head of the photography department at London’s National Portrait Gallery, in the book’s foreword.

Though Sternberger has since faded into obscurity, many of his portraits have not. It was the golden age of photojournalism, but his photographs—including of some of the most celebrated political leaders, artists, and intellectuals of the time—were meant not only to document, but to tease out and capture his subjects’ personalities: FDR looking elegant and determined (his image on the dime was produced from one of Sternberger’s shots); a humorless Freud who, Loewentheil writes, “could easily have discerned the psychology taking place on both sides of the lens, [still] even he was not immune to its effects”; Frida Kahlo smiling beatifically, a flower crown fixed to her hair and mystery behind her eyes; Albert Einstein looking impish (of his portrait, he wrote, “It seems quite amazing to me that you could present this subject so appetizingly”). Sternberger’s portraits revealed intimate, rarely-observed characteristics of these well-known figures, who were accustomed to managing their public personae; his image of father and daughter Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi sitting together, for example, shows them emanating mutual love and respect.

The invention of photography the century before had been followed by the fledgling field of psychology, sparking a new interest in emotional expression. Starting in the 1840s, neurologist and physiologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne used painless electrical probes and a camera to stimulate and document movement in the facial muscles, which led to more complex questions about how facial expressions related to a person’s character and behavior. When Sternberger was working, huge developments in psychology—he went on to photograph Duchenne’s star student’s protégé, Sigmund Freud—had converged with the handheld camera’s increasing democratization of photography. The psychological portrait, Sternberger’s visionary theory, embodied his acute awareness of the complex relations required of a portrait session.

After fleeing his native Hungary in the 1930s, when attacks on Jewish citizens escalated, Sternberger taught Hebrew and Jewish history in Prague, then became a professional journalist writing for Austrian, French, and Hungarian publications. His wife, Ilse, gave Sternberger his first Leica as a wedding gift in 1933. He came to public attention after photographing the Belgian royal family in 1935, and with their help he moved his family to London, then to New York, when World War II began.

He went on to lecture at NYU on the psychological portrait, while becoming, with Ilse’s support and collaboration, one of the most important portrait photographers in America. Ilse had studied photography in Berlin, and provided both technical and artistic assistance, holding the black cloth backdrop behind Sternberger’s subjects as well as engaging in conversation with them, “often provoke[ing] joyful interactions among the participants,” writes Loewentheil. There are a handful of photographs in The Psychological Portrait in which Ilse, between formal shots, has lowered the backdrop cloth and appears smiling behind Nehru, Freud, or Shaw.