Physiognomy

Mishka Zigonoff, pen, 2026

 Thousands and thousands of portraits I've drawn and painted with always the same objective; to capture the likeness of the one portrayed. People have told me that in the best of portraits something more is depicted, call it the soul. I've come to doubt this. What's left beyond a physiognomy is my insecurity (from a self-assured vantage point there's never even a beyond). 

 Mishka Ziganoff here, was drawn sixteen years after I drew him in the context of The Top 100 2010, an annual illustrated list of 100 songs. The text to go along the image was titled, as it is here, Physiognomy. The image below is one six similar portraits on colored post-it papers from 2010. The following text comes from the post linked to above, slightly edited.

The photo of Mishka Ziganoff, apparently the only one in existence, appears on Google Images either cropped at the top or cropped at the bottom, none showed the full photo. The character of Ziganoff in the images of which the chin was cut off appeared more sympathetic than those in which the forehead was cut off. In these images Ziganoff also appears leaner than with the reverse crop. Intrigued and puzzled by why I interpreted the same image so differently I did a little experiment: I drew the face several times, starting with one or the other cropped variety, and investigate how it would influence my act of drawing it. I would investigate the physiognomy of Ziganoff's face. I soon found out that beside the different croppings that influence the interpretation of his face several other elements contribute to the assessment of the character Mishka Ziganoff as well. Some interpretations are subjective, some objective, others are plain old stereotypes. Knowing a bit about the cultural history of Mishka Ziganoff certainly influences how I depicted the person. This is what I know: He was Russian, born in the late 19th Century in Odessa, Ukraine. Immigrated to the United States in the early 20th Century, recorded his Koilen in New York City in 1919.

Ziganoff appears to be of Romani descent, was a Christian and spoke fluent Yiddish. He became an important figure in the development of Klezmer music in the United States. Sixteen years after the above quote was written, the full image of Ziganoff is readily available on line. And another photograph as well (I drew it too, below). Is a photo camera more objective than the hand of an artist? Can a photograph capture a soul? I have too, read the seminal The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, as well as parts of the Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. In the age of AI some insights from these writers are particularly relevant. Within the past year I've drawn approximately 6,000 portraits. These were done, in a way, in response to the debate on AI. Images of people, real and fictitious, from anytime and anyplace are used as data input. I train.

Ballpoint on notebook paper, 2026

Post-script (10/31/2026): 

The very next time the topic of physiognomy announced itself was during reading "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin from 1935. In a section on the German photographer August Sander, Benjamin discusses physiognomy and uses two illustrations from 1929, both of a 'type' similar to that of Zigonoff. I'm not interested in categories, but rather how the 'spirit' of individuals seems to relate. Below are drawings of Sander's portraits used by Benjamin; "Pastry Cook" on the left and "Parliamentary Representative (a Democrat)" on the right.