A place to start: with personhood, with the most direct impression.Indexical in medium, the figure named, their likeness legible.

A more oblique example of the same mode –

Another at the edge of effacement –

Then:A less direct form, but still a resemblance. The sitters named, resolutely themselves. (Arranged in degrees of clarity: Dora Sowden, Terrence and Mom).

Things begin to slip.Here, a name and the word 'portrait'. Portrait of Julia. But no likeness to speak of. Instead – gestures, thickness, muddy opacity.

Named again, an image of a historical figure denied by a child's eclipsing crayon.

There are others without overture to personhood, similarly obscured (struck through by whiteness or hidden beneath spreading blackness).

Still another, rendered faceless by fire.

Even the photographed figure at times resists the medium's ambitions to precisely transcribe their likeness, becoming ghostly and indistinct, given without name.

Or appearing as a portrait of absence –

There are then those figures that remain hidden, are disguised beneath cloth or bound in hazard tape. All betray the individual (or deity) beneath – in title or image.

Others are wholly absent, recalled in only the empty vessels of clothing: hats without heads, sleeves without limbs. Where some remember named individuals, others evoke anonymous figures.

Present in degrees of likeness, or hidden, erased, obscured and absent – the body that is somebody and the body that is no body. There are others.