Photography and the Re-Imagined Self at Gardner Museum

Sherman was on no account the primary. The earliest {photograph} within the present is from 1920, Claude Cahun’s “Self-portrait (with shaved head),” one among her 4 images within the present. Hanging close by is Gillian Wearing’s “Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face.” Next to it, and much more wheels-within-wheels, is Wearing’s “Me as Madame and Monsieur Duchamp.” She poses as each Marcel Duchamp and Duchamp’s imaginary feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. Oh, and dealing with Wearing’s {photograph} is a 1923 Man Ray portrait of Duchamp posing as Sélavy. With personas, gender fluidity can develop into gender indefinability.

A persona is about pretending, but the extra it aligns with actuality (no matter that’s) the extra fascinating it turns into. For that matter, what does pretense even imply when speaking a few two-dimensional rendering of three dimensions. {A photograph}, in that sense, is itself all pretense.

The actuality can align with that of somebody apart from the photographer, as with Wearing’s two images. David Wojnarowicz’s alignment is with the 19^th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and Yasumasa Morimura’s with Frida Kahlo. Samuel Fosso presents himself as Angela Davis and, taking off from Eve Arnold’s famous portrait, Malcolm X. You can’t spell “impersonation” with out “persona.”

Does a fictional character qualify as precise? If the character is as well-known as Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, maybe the character could be mentioned even to surpass actuality. Yinka Shonibare channels Gray in a dozen extremely theatrical photographs. Or there’s anti-actuality, as one may name it. In Mariko Mori’s “Tea Ceremony III,” the photographer pretends to be an area alien. If all extraterrestrials had been so enchanting, Area 51 would appeal to extra guests than Las Vegas.

Almost all of the photographers in “Persona” show cleverness and wit, however hardly ever humor. We get play with out playfulness. Perhaps identification is simply too severe a enterprise. Mori is an exception. So is Tseng Kwong Chi, along with his Mao-jacketed presence in geopolitically incongruous locations: in entrance of the Roman Colosseum, by the Statue of Liberty, in Canada’s Banff National Park, on the dunes in Provincetown. Or there are the sparkly coronary heart stickers on the white mattes of Tomoko Sawada’s “OMIAI♡,” a set of 10 portraits of her as brides.

Maternity inspires the four images from Jamie Diamond’s “I Promise to be a Good Mother” series. It’s a different version of wheels-within-wheels, as Diamond is herself a mother (though in the photographs it’s a baby doll she holds). Diamond’s “Monstra Te Esse Matrem,” which means “show yourself to be a mother,” is currently hanging on the museum’s Fitzpatrick Façade. It offers a nice bit of misdirection: There, too, the baby she holds is a doll, but behind Diamond are her own two children. (Admirers of the 2024 façade image, Hakeem Adewumi’s “Possession of a Recalcitrant Dream,” should know that, on a much smaller scale, it’s in “Persona.”)

A version of persona, a very potent one, is public image. In that sense, Isabella Stewart Gardner had several: art collector, cultural doyenne, aristocratic eccentric, Red Sox rooter, self-made châtelaine. So “Picturing Isabella,” with its various photographs of Gardner, makes for a close-to-home complement to “Persona.” The Gardner’s Sylvia Hickman curated.

As it happens, Gardner grew wary of the camera. “I am never photographed,” she said in 1915, “unless by some Kodak fiend, and who does it on the sly.” Recluse, a kind of persona in reverse, became one of Gardner’s personas, too.

Two of the photographs are of paintings of Gardner. It’s clear which medium she preferred, though that preference didn’t keep her from posing for Adolph de Meyer, who would become Vogue’s first official fashion photographer. The show offers slightly more than two dozen photographs of Gardner. Most are of the slice-of-life variety: with friends, with her dog, in a gondola, climbing a ladder during the construction of Fenway Court (as what is now the museum was then known).

The most moving photograph, though, is posed. We tend to think of intimacy as more often found in candid images. That is not the case here. The photograph shows Gardner with her young son, Jackie. The proud mother beams, and her happiness assumes a terrible poignancy with the knowledge that Jackie was less than 2 when he died. Gardner and her husband had no other children.

Wall labels note the sexism behind the press coverage Gardner tended to receive, which surely contributed to her eventual reclusiveness. They’re right to do so. That point does seem a bit odd, though, what with the museum’s endless references to “Isabella” this and “Isabella” that. Yes, that first-name basis is central to the museum’s branding. Yes, people really seem to respond to it. But for some reason the Frick Collection doesn’t fill its web site with references to “Henry” or the Phillips Collection to “Duncan.”

The fixed Isabella references call to mind these traces from the 1950 Disney model of “Cinderella”: “Cinderella, Cinderella/ All I hear is Cinderella.” Substitute one other four-syllable title ending in “a” — that letter once more — and also you may start to surprise if Fenway Court has a pair of glass slippers stashed away someplace.

PERSONA: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self

PICTURING ISABELLA

At Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way, by May 10 and June 21, respectively. 617-566-1401, www.gardnermuseum.org

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Mark Feeney could be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.