Edward Curtis
Edward Curtis
I suspect that what we think of as portraiture is originally an invention of painters. Everyone has mannerisms, a tilt of the head, an eyebrow arch, a curl of the lip, and so on which become identified with ones personality and associated character. These mannerisms are usually not simultaneous but the painter gathers them all up and incorporates them into one depiction of a face. The result is a subtle caricature that unsuspecting viewers applaud as true, insightful, revelatory, great portrait, etc, etc.
Photographers can do the same thing and it works just as well. But it takes time and keen observation on the part of the photographer to note and exploit all those tiny but revelatory quirks of character. Plain photographs of heads or faces are, I reckon, easier to do than portraits and lead to the unwritten caption under most pictures of individuals: "This is a picture of me having my photograph taken."
Photography:first utterance. Sir John Herschel, 14 March 1839 at the Royal Society. "...Photography or the application of the Chemical rays of light to the purpose of pictorial representation,..".
I would agree with this wholeheartedly. In fact, I would go further and suggest that the expression in photography as a whole is about the relationship between the photographer and their subject. I find looking at photographs where the relationship is missing quite tiresome.
Lenny
EigerStudios
Museum Quality Drum Scanning and Printing
That squares with my own experiences doing portraiture. My most successful portraits have been of aunts, uncles, and cousins: people who I've known for decades and decades, yet haven't actually lived with. It wasn't so hard to get a picture of my uncle's most characteristic expressions. I asked him to "sit for a portrait" - a concept he was quite familiar with, given the countless times my grandfather asked the same of everyone in our family. I asked him to think of certain things, and asked him gently provoking questions. I got two very good shots of him from that. Little micro-expressions, gestures, a certain tilt of the head, - all things everyone in our family recognizes as "him".
My second best portraits have actually been of my children's teachers. I just ask them to stand in a certain kind of light, and let me take a picture of them. Their typical "I'm standing for a picture" pose isn't too bad, really, and I've had some luck catching a moment when they have a certain kind of thoughtfulness in their eyes and hands. They do the worst, actually, with unposed and candid shots: I can get very well exposed photos of them looking quite awkward and uncomfortable. They are emotionally truthful, but fairly uncomfortable to look at.
I try for two things in my portraits: a depiction of the person as they are commonly seen, with their characteristic gestures and tics, and a little flash of insight showing them how I see them. Most of the time I only achieve the first, but it make them happy.
My best tool is to ask my sitter to think of something particular, indirectly, by asking them a question about it, or telling them a joke about it. People are terrible at hiding themselves when they are thinking and responding to something they are really invested in. It is dangerous. People don't like being revealed. It's unkind to reveal certain things about people. You'll find out the nature of your own character by the questions you dare to ask.
Celebrity portraiture is it's own thing for reasons others have said. Those are working pictures, ones that they need to reflect a certain image in order to project a certain status. It's really a kind of business portraiture. For the artist, there's some freedom of expression with props and locations, and it can be a very collaborative process, a film in miniature. Perhaps the real character of the person is present as well, but it would be impossible to tell, since part of their job is to obscure the difference between self and self-as-character. The same can be said of political types, or businessmen who need corporate head shots, etc.
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