Lot Essay
"Zahalka first dealt with portraiture in her 1987 Resemblance series which was based on seventeenth-century Dutch painting. The delight in these large, elegant chromogenic prints, with their reassuring art-historical citations, perhaps masked what was most interesting about them: the challenge they presented to established photographic practice. Taking photographs that were intended to function, at least on one level, as "real" portraits of living people, but in a pastiche style quoting a genre of painting that had been functionally redundant but aesthetically valorized for four centuries, stretched the assumptions underpinning our conventions of candid portraiture." (M. Jolly, "Anne Zahalka: Spurs of the Moment", Art & Text, no. 54, 1996, p. 63.)