For a recent entry in the Substack Embodied Meanings, Donald Brackett discusses Out of Character: Writing on Portraits by Tom Hare, alongside fellow Zone author, Jean-Christophe Bailly’s A Silent Apostrophe. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“The portrait of Zen Master Ikkyu by Joto and that of the sculptor Juan Montanes by Velazquez are examples of two distinctly different depictions of a human face, one of which also contains a written text sharing the space of the image and given an equivalent content value that holds a special allure for Tom Hare in his comprehensive study Out of Character: Writing on Portraits. His specific interest is about both writing on the portrait itself as well as writing on the portrait, as in about it, conducted by the aesthetic explorer examining shared elements of emphasis by cultures which are otherwise separated by both space and time as well as language and beliefs.”