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Portraits is a suite of 36 drawings from my Trilogy series, in a way extending the investigation that I began with Ethnographia and Ethnographia 2.1. As in Ethnographia 2.1, the protagonist of Portraits from the Old Country is a traveler; a tourist, an ethnographer, an outsider whose knowledge of the cultures that he comments on is limited not only by his station as an outsider but also by the prejudices which that station engenders.

Some have suggested that the protagonist in Portraits might be me, in which case the suite becomes a sort of exercise in the Empire fighting back. However, this is quite inaccurate as the notes in the drawings make clear. The protagonist is American traveling in England. True, there is an element of the Empire fighting back, but only from the perspective of the New World looking at/down on the Old.

The suite--and the entire Trilogy--is really not about the colony getting back. It is more an exercise in what I have called an archaeology of knowledge, digging into the nature of episteme, how it is brought into being, and how having come to be, it proceeds to shape subsequent knowledge and the world around it.

Portraits was first exhibited at Gorney, Bravin + Lee in New York. 6 drawings from the suite are presently in the Reis collection in Belgium.