Photograph of Steinberg Drawing Projected onto Hedda Sterne with Glass

This portrait is one of a series in which a drawing of a woman by Saul Steinberg was projected onto Hedda Sterne’s face. In this example, Sterne appears to gaze directly at the camera as she lifts a drinking glass to her lips, which casts a shadow around her nose and lips that obscures her face even more than the drawing alone. And below, the round beads of her necklace glisten in the projected light. Together, these accessories further heighten the play of light, shadow, and form that characterizes the series as a whole. In wielding the medium of photography in this way, Steinberg’s portraits recall the kinds of photographic experiments that artists like Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes had engaged in since the 1920s, manipulating light, shadow, framing, and form to artistic ends.