photographing the essence

A friend recently asked me to photograph someone and an appointment was arranged.

We went together to meet the lady at her house where she was staying with her mother. Her name is Shobana which means beauty and as she showed some old photographs of her self, it was clear that she was once beautiful and perhaps still is.

My friend seemed in a hurry to get the session over with. I was however feeling tired and was invited to lie down on a bed next door for awhile then given tea. After this, we had the photographic session but it did not go well. My friend did not help by telling Shobana where she should be looking and it was not until too late that I realised this was preventing the sitter from relaxing.

It is suggested that the photographer should be in control of the situation and while I agree to this to a certain extent, it seems that what needs to happen is for the photographer to allow the sitter to be relaxed enough to reveal a little of themselves.

After this session, I felt I had missed the subject. It would be too easy to blame my friend for orchestrating the occasion yet it had not been possible for me to find the essence of the subject through the lens and so the portrait session did not live up to expectations.

It was for me, a learning experience.

selecting images

The initial selection is not so difficult. One wants to remove images that are unacceptable (e.g. the flash did not fire, the exposure was incorrect etc) unless they have some aesthetic impact. Usually, I have a burst of several images of one subject of which only one is necessary but more can be selected if they are of value.

starting People and Place exercises

FInally, I have got underway with the People and Place module thanks to some willing subjects. The first was fusion musician, Chinmaya Dunster, along with his 3 month year old baby (the latter was good in the changing expressions exercise 6 referred to as "best of a sequence") while after that a few Tibetan women were ready to pose for me while visiting a Tibetan refugee village in Orissa, East India. There was also the chance to do some other exercises here such as the occasion of a sacred dance performance as well as a place where 11 stupa (Buddhist reliquary monuments) had been recently constructed and was visited dawn and dusk by pilgrims. Still a lot more to do though and am presently trying to enlist models at my latest location in Pune near Mumbai, India where there has recently been an explosion that has killed 13 people.

A PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK

Visiting the interesting photographic museum in Antwerp, Belgium, I came across a photobook of portraits. The photographer, Jacob Reis, had presented 100 photographs of 100 different people all born in different years during the last century.
The photographs are in colour and the printing in some cases rather over-exaggerates this which does not help the portraits. However, the overall effect is impressive with most people being portrayed in their environment which in most cases means the home.
A fascinating record of Belgians that illustrates people from many different walks of life.

reflections on portrait painting; the origins of portrait photography!

It might be beneficial to consider portrait painting; this art form was largely superseded by photography which was able to give a more exact representation in a much shorter time. Yet, as the author Kranz points out in a small book published on the portrait, "that even photography is not objective" since it is also subjective. The impression left by the sitter is going to be dependant on the sitter, the photographer and those for whom the portrait is intended.

The author mentions the work of August Sander and Thomas Ruff, concluding by saying that "reflections on the portrait as a work of art are not rendered redundant even in the brave new world of pixels."

The following is a brief account of what the author argues and may be of help in understanding the genre of portraiture as a whole.

a visit to the National Portrait Gallery

Last week, a visit to the National Portrait Gallery which lies behind the National Gallery overlooking Trafalgar Square in London. The annual Portrait Gallery exhibition was on and it was interesting to see the results and what modern contemporary portrait painters offer. What was interesting was a few paintings that had obviously been done from photographs (probably most had been!) and reflected the fine detail that the photographic portrait contains. In fact, one of these had taken four years to finish as egg tempura was used and the result looked more life like than a photograph since it almost glowed. Staring closely at it, a portrait of the artist's son, one found it hard not to believe it was a photograph while a much larger portrait of an elderly woman also conveyed a sense of realism that could only come from a photograph. It made me reflect a little on the relationship between art and photography and clearly, here was an example of photography allowing the artist to create something more realistic than a photograph. This beggars the question as to what might be accomplished if the photographer, having made his portrait photograph, then got to work using filters in Photoshop. By adding a little abstraction, he/she might possibly end up with an image that gives an insight into the sitter that straight photography misses!? I have done this but not pursued the matter.

interaction in portrait photography

It appears that one of the most important conditions for portrait photography is the rapport that exists between the photographer and subject/s. "Rapport" would appear to be the correct word here since it implies a level of exchange in which both parties are equal.

The photographer, it seems, needs to be in control of what is happening but not controlling. This may sound like a rather fine point but an overbearing photographer will not be able to help his subjects relax. If a person is not at ease when being photographed, he will start to get tense which is likely to show in strained musculature of the face as well as a guarded expression.

Of course, there are always exceptions to this rule and a classic example is when Yousuf Karsh photographed Sir Winston Churchill. Unable to get the expression he wanted, Karsh snatched Churchills trademark cigar from his hand and one was left with an iconic image of a glowering face, the archetypal british bulldog, who was best known for his stirring speeches to the British people during the Second World War in the mid-nineteenth century.