In the 21st century, everything needs a face: from fundraising campaigns to consumer goods to national memory. These faces always have large, expressive eyes that they direct at their viewers, and they proclaim messages, often in the first person singular.

Such images are ubiquitous, and banal. I would like to take their banality as a challenge: What do you see in them when you look at them from an unfamiliar angle, from the past? Not who, but what do they actually show? My presentation is firstly about their models and forerunners: Where do such images come from? Secondly, about rules of visual representation: How do you turn the image of an individual person into a “we” that can embody the collective? Third, I would like to investigate the emergence of a particular concept with which these speech acts are linked today, namely identity. Is it indeed “historical”?

 

Valentin Groebner, received his Ph.D. in 1991 at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. He has taught as a Visiting Associate Professor in spring 2000 at the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and in 2001 as a professeur invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Since 2004, he is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. His more recent books in German focus on the visual culture of self-representation: Ich-Plakate. Eine Geschichte des Gesichts als Aufmerksamkeitsmaschine, Frankfurt/a.M 2015 and on the history of tourism Retroland. Geschichtstourismus und die Sehnsucht nach dem Authentischen, Frankfurt/a.M. 2018.