Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” ―
In Andreas Feininger’s 1973 landmark book, Photographic Seeing, in a section called “The Different Forms of Seeing,” he discusses how four different and well-known photographers might (key word) photograph an identical female subject. He then posits a theory that their “differences in ‘seeing’ would, of course, reflect in their work” and goes on to eviscerate each of their hypothetical images as “sterile,” “dull,” “unimaginative,” “stereotypical and rather cold.” Yikes!
Are you who you photograph?
My friend Rick Sammon has a theory about this same subject and he phrases it this way: “The camera looks both ways” and thinks “that in picturing the subject, you are also picturing a part of yourself.” After reading that particular section of Feininger’s book, Rick’s concept came to mind as I lie in bed the other night (instead of sleeping) thinking about what my portraits of women say about me. I don’t want to bother you with all of the neo-Freudian ideas that ran through my mind but the concept was still fresh in my mind this morning. Hence this post.
Here’s another thought: Richard Avedon once said,“ My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” By that I think he meant when he makes a portrait he likes to control as much of the environment, and maybe even the subject themselves to create a photograph of his subject reflecting his view of them, not how the subject may see themselves. Maybe, and I may be all wet in my thinking, that this approach applies to my glamour images, such as the featured portrait, as well. And the more I think about it, the more it seems to ring true. Or maybe it’s just another form of my OCD that maybe all/some/many other photographers have because we all want to reorder the world into how we think it should be not what it might actually be. Let me know,what you think?
How I Made this Portrait: The image illustrating today’s post is of Kellie Alexander Yes, that Kellie Alexander, who you can read about here, concerning a subsequent session we had together and all the commotion it created when the images I made of her were submitted for publication in a popular photography magazine of the time. That photograph, it turned out, was never published but you can see it in the linked post and it might just surprise you.
I photographed Kellie in the North-facing bay window of the kitchen on my former home using a Canon EOS 20D and an EF 135mm f/2.8 SF lens. With a close focusing capability of 4.3-feet, this is not the kind of focal length I would or could use indoors in a small kitchen but somehow made it work and I love the perspective it gives. Exposure was 1/250 sec at f/2,8 and ISO 400 with a plus two stop exposure compensation.
What does this image and the other images of her say about me? I dunno but some thoughts in the above paragraph seem to ring true…or maybe not.
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