i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

176 / The Extended Familytogether, would picture American society in a somewhat different light. Likeany individual, the portraits, and the historical moment they personify, cannever be completely known nor their meanings permanently ƒxed. Neel’sAmerican portrait gallery provides not proof but evidence, visual evidence fora visually based culture to examine. Her realist charge remained to elicitrecognition. In answering James Joyce’s call for the “Ineluctable modality ofthe visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes,” 34 Neel not onlyconstructed herself but brought us into confrontation with ourselves. This interchange,based on a reading of facial and bodily signals, permits the viewer tosituate him/herself along various axes, to posit identity as located on a series oftrajectories. Now that interpersonal exchanges frequently occur on-line ratherthan face to face (or face to portrait), and images themselves proliferate andmetamorphose electronically without connection to a body, identity has becomeever more mobile and mutable. In our current world of electronic interchange,Neel’s portrait conventions constitute an invaluable database, a resourceas well as an historical record.