Picture perfect

At the heart of every portrait lies a virtual impossibility. How can a person’s essence be captured in one image when human beings are by definition so changeable and manifold?

And yet, painters and photographers remain certain that their subjects’ souls lie within their reach. Several of the five photographers represented in the ArtWalk at Lenox Square show About Face aspire to capture that human “essence” and bottle it in photographic form. It’s a questionable proposition, but doesn’t keep these photographers from offering some intriguing work.

Anna Watson’s baby portraits are especially memorable for the way they subvert the baby photographer’s urge to crystallize an ecstatic moment of cuteness. Instead, Watson freeze-frames real baby behavior in her goo-goo verite: an infant with a nugget of drool suspended on its glossy red lips or another image of a baby who has been placed face down on a bureau as absentmindedly as a ham sandwich.

Like Shannon McCollum’s photographs of African-American iPod hipsters, Watson’s other images of attractive young women can suggest fashion photography. Both artists play into the same frustrating indie-film phenomenon of artists whose view of humanity seems limited to the narrowly defined subset of their own peers. Kristine Potter’s exquisitely rendered ink jet prints of immigrants on the streets of Paris are more successful at evoking inner mixtures of hardship and mettle, and that quicksilver notion of “character” in youngish subjects.

If some About Face artists strive to render the soul, Geoffrey E. Aronson hopes to embody an equally elusive concept in his images of what he sees as quintessential innocents. Subjects are “innocent,” Aronson says, because they live close to nature, for whatever that’s worth. In his nevertheless whimsical photo collages, Aronson decorates his Mexican subjects like saints in a shrine, hanging seashells and seahorses from their ears or back-dropping their faces with halos of green leaves.

Ted Maloof, fortunately, makes no high-blown claims for divination through portraiture. Instead, he seems content to create exquisitely mannered images reminiscent of such masters as Stieglitz or Steichen. Filtering out context, Maloof does his subjects the great service of making them appear timeless. Like all great portraits, these don’t profess to offer you their subjects’ innards on a platter, but instead give you just a taste — making you hungry to know more.

About Face: Commanding Portraits by Five Georgia Photographers runs through Jan. 9 at Lenox Square Promenade in the walkway between Lenox Square and JW Marriott Buckhead Atlanta. 3393 Peachtree Road. 770-435-5180. Mon.-Sat., 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sun., noon-6 p.m.