CONCORD — Portraits are never just about the person portrayed. They can be as much about the portrait’s presumed audience. That audience can consist of the sitter’s family or community or, not to get too grand, that thing called posterity (meaning us). “Portrait Mode,” which runs at the Concord Museum through Feb. 23, is very much alert to how portraiture can be more involved than it seems.
The title of the show, curated by the museum’s Reed Gochberg, is a nicely understated joke. The words “portrait mode” are familiar to anyone with an iPhone. In contrast, the portraits and portrait-adjacent items here, nearly all from the 19th century, are decidedly low tech: a sculpture, paintings, silhouettes, photo albums (one of which could be mistaken for a small-size family Bible), visiting cards, ambrotypes and tintypes (early photographic processes), and two necklaces with lockets in which such photographs might have been kept as sentimental keepsakes. The jewelry testifies to how emotion can matter more than identification when it comes to portraits.
“Portrait Mode” is a small show. Exhibited in a single gallery, it features not quite three-dozen items, all from the museum’s collection. But it touches on some large issues: identity, for one, and the interaction of social hierarchy and cultural valuation, for another. Underscoring those issues is the presence of a large mirror from the early 19th century, as well as an empty picture frame (made in Amsterdam, circa 1850) and very handsome it is. How a portrait is presented is another element in the larger enterprise. An image in a family album has a very different valence from one hanging in a public building.
Most important of all, there’s the opportunity to consider a larger process, one that everyone joins in, and today no less than then. How is it that an individual does or does not stay within what the French historian Fernand Braudel called “submerged history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its participants”? With that in mind, “Portrait Mode” is a kind of pendant to the other temporary show at the museum, “What Makes History? New Stories from the Collection,” which runs through Feb. 17. Think of this one as “Who Makes It Into History?”
Most of the subjects here are anonymous or little known. Anonymity: That’s another issue raised, not so much for what it says about the individual as about a society little interested in his or her identity. Some sitters were once well known in Concord, such as Jack Garrison, who had escaped slavery and was later given a walking stick in honor of being the town’s oldest resident. Others had a greater, if still narrow, claim to fame, such as Una Hawthorne, daughter of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (she’s seen in a photograph of surpassing delicacy), or John Thoreau, brother of the author of “Walden.” He was painted by their sister Sophia.
In a different category of celebrity are the Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller — encircling her silhouette portrait is starburst ornamentation, fittingly enough for such a vivid personality — and three of the four figures in the sculpture, John Rogers’s “The Fugitive’s Story,” from 1869. It shows two famous Abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison and Henry Ward Beecher, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (also an Abolitionist), and an anonymous Black woman, holding a small child. The noble ideals of the three men notwithstanding, nowhere else in “Portrait Mode” is as clear the interplay of fame and anonymity, or identity asserted and identity disregarded.
“The Fugitive’s Story” is a reminder how events can intrude on day-to-day life, not just enabling but sometimes forcing emergence from Braudel’s “submerged history.” The Civil War and slavery keep cropping up in “Portrait Mode”: from the sculpture to a photograph of four Union soldiers to a posthumously painted portrait of a Union corporal who died in 1861. There’s also what happened to Jack Garrison some time before he sat for his portrait. When he learned that a Southerner would be visiting near where he lived — this was after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act — he went into hiding, fearful of being returned to bondage.
PORTRAIT MODE
At Concord Museum, 52 Cambridge Turnpike, Concord, through Feb. 23. 978-369-9763, concordmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.