Studio Photography
When I photograph an individual in the studio, I’m searching for the essence of their character. For me, it is an exploration, a type of visual study of someone. Sure, there are other types of studio shooting. Fashion photographers will create a mood or a feeling and have the model artificially reflect an attitude to help market a product. This is commercial or fashion photography, and is not the type of studio shooting that I do anymore. I am interested in exploring the contours of the face as a window to some truth about an individual. This might be a façade to hide a more personal exploration? Richard Avedon said, “every portrait is a self-portrait.” On the surface it is hard to see how that could be true since a photograph of someone is of that person and not of the photographer. There are many assumptions that go into the interpretation of what photographs mean and how much legitimacy and photograph might have for a viewer. In this sense, a series of images of someone might tell a story all together one way, while an individual image selected from a series would tell a different story.
A photographer will select an image that represents the best of many images from a photo session. That image will show the photographer’s perception of the best image. In that sense it is a portrait of the photographer’s perception. This is not what the world see s when looking at a photo. The average viewer sees the person in the photograph as expressing particular, visually obvious qualities, and easily defines those as a truth about that person. The image has photographic reality and is often simply accepted on face value as real.
Whether or not a selected image is a truthful portrayal of someone can be debated, but my sense of it is that the image displays “a truth”, and not “the truth”. People are way too complex for us to think that a single image could define them. However, this does not address the statement by Richard Avedon about every portrait being a self-portrait. To approach that issue we must think about the more striking concept that a series of portraits of a variety of people over many years might show us something about the photographer! Henri Cartier-Bresson created a body of photographic work over his lifetime. It shows us that he had a deep sense of humanity and compassion about his subjects. While he is will known as was one of the founders of the photo agency, Magnum, which has a reputation for hard edge war photographers, his work seemed to always search out the beautiful, the positive, and the humane. Thus, over time, we have a portrait of the photographer through the character of his images. Perhaps in this sense, “every portrait is a self-portrait
