Paper cut-out from the book "Portraits of Greatness" from Yousuf Karsh
30.4 x 23.7 cm (unframed)
48.6 x 41.6 x 2.8 cm (framed)


The American surgeon Dr. Alfred Blalock gained recognition for his contribution to early developments in cardiac surgery through his research into Tetralogy of Fallot, or “blue baby syndrome,” as well as for his work on the treatment of traumatic shock. He was nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and, in 1959, was included in Yousuf Karsh’s photobook, Portraits of Greatness. The monograph profiled a notable selection of sitters, recognized for their achievements in science, politics, music, film, and literature.
 
In 2003, Cerith Wyn Evans included this portrait of Alfred Blalock in a series of works based on pages taken directly from Karsh’s 1959 work. In the series, the artist adapts the pages by removing perfectly circular sections, thereby disrupting the unity of the image, and the wholeness of its surface to interrogate the ideology that lies behind the production and dispersion of portraits like these as symbols with cultural and historical value. The demi-godliness of the sitters, as fabricated by Karsh in his use of theatrical lighting, comes under question as the impression of each image as a mark of greatness is physically deconstructed by the artist’s exposure of its two-dimensionality. Through these simple manipulations, the artist points to questions which continue to surround the history of portraiture through periods of technological advancement, during which photographic methods which promised truth and accuracy have also been used as vehicles for the cultivation of myth and grandeur in ways that influence popular perception. –Elsa Gray