Is it wrong to paint someone’s portrait without their consent? Does doing so invade their privacy, taking intimacy from them? InPortrait of a Lady on Fire, writer-directorCéline Sciamma为18世纪晚期布列塔尼的一位女性肖像画家呈现了这种伦理困境。这名肖像画家被雇来给一位年轻女子作画，而这名女子已经拒绝坐下来给别人看，也没有人告诉她肖像画家去她家的原因。

One goal of the portrait is straightforwardly economic: it is to be taken to a prospective (and supposedly wealthy) spouse to entice him to marry the subject. So the portrait must make its subject look attractive, but not so unrealistically beautiful that the supposed suitor feels cheated when they finally meet. But the portraitist has additional goals: she wants to reveal what she sees in her subject, aspects of her subject that she may not even recognize herself. Day by day, the portraitist spends casual time with her subject, surreptitiously sketching her and hoping to keep her sketches hidden.

As she becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the representation she is creating, both she and the audience are pressed to consider what the problems are. Is it just that it’s hard to paint from memory and episodic sketches? Or, it is hard to paint someone well when they are not willing participants in the project? Or, are there other artistic goals that require the subject’s agreement?

这些问题已经在摄影的背景下进行了广泛的讨论。One example is in a majorretrospectivenow at SFMOMA. Photographer Dawoud Bey’s early work,Harlem, USA，旨在代表黑人主题。作为一名摄影师，他的目标是呈现不常听到的人的故事;他辩解说，只有他们知道他在做什么，并和他分享他们的故事，他才能这样做。和碧昂丝一样，夏玛电影中的肖像画家也在为自己能否真实地表现拍摄对象而努力，因为她偷偷地画了一些肖像，希望自己的努力不被发现。

More generally, writers in aesthetics have debated whether photography is different from portraiture in ways that illuminate the struggles of the portraitist in Sciamma’s film. Some think that photographers merely depict while portraitists, well,paint.Portraiture, these writers say, is mediated by the artist in a way that photography is not. The artist in Sciamma’s film is creating an image of her subject but through her art; she is not just replicating, as these critics believe photos do. On extreme versions of this view about photography, photographers do not exercise artistic agency; they instead exercise the technological ability to reproduce a moment in time. So perhaps photographers need consent to replicate their subjects, but artists don’t, because they aren’t really replicating something about the subject; they are creating something new.

但这种关于摄影的观点是有争议的。PhilosopherDominic Lopeshas offered the most sustained criticism of the view that photography only depicts, arguing inFour Arts of Photographyand many other works that photography becomes art in multiple ways. Photography is not simply concerned with epistemic accuracy, Lopes contends. Instead, photographers reveal unseen aspects of the world, express concepts, deploy techniques, and display abstract formal properties.

我认为Lopes对摄影的看法是正确的。但是得出的结论并不是摄影师不需要同意——这意味着肖像摄影师也不需要同意。事实上，恰恰相反——而且原因是肖像画家也需要征得同意。摄影师和肖像画家都揭示了她的主题更深或未被认识的方面。他们通过别人的眼睛看到并呈现他们的主题。因此，他们冒着被揭露的风险，这可能会给他们的主题带来麻烦或泄露私人信息。他们也会利用拍摄对象的形象来达到自己的目的，从展示技术魔法到主张强有力的社会批判。简而言之，他们利用自己的主题作为实现自己艺术目标的手段。

In Sciamma’s film, the portraitist’s problem is that there is more to representation than replication. The portraitist cannot create a reasonable picture of her subject without evoking and capturing elements of her subject that her subject does not see. In so doing, however, she risks revealing aspects that her subject would not want the world to see, that her subject thinks are misrepresentations, or that her subject would disavow.

Images of faces and bodies are not just superficial; they reflect aspects of identity as constructed by others. Sciamma’s film is deep on many levels, but one of the most important is how it asks us to think about portraiture, privacy, and consent.