Portraits, characters and persons

Abstract

A recent experience of ‘returning’ photographs to acquaintances in Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea, leads to questions about the recognition of character. People acknowledge characteristic ways of acting or behaving, but it is not at all clear that these are simply attached to individual persons. To what entity might such characteristics be attached, and what are the ethical repercussions? There seems something of a parallel between the way English-speakers bundle together the elements of someone's character and how they might compose a portrait; indeed to the various senses of ‘character’ as specification of qualities, intrinsic nature or customary habit, one might add the work it does in ‘painting a portrait’, as the metaphor goes. A completely unlooked-for response on the part of Hagen friends to my proposal to seek out people in order to give what in some cases I had thought of as portraits, namely photographs of themselves and close kin, forced me to think afresh about what it means to have pictures of persons. This in turn might throw some light on character as analytic.