Portraits
noun
1 a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, especially one depicting only the face or head and shoulders.
• a representation or impression of someone or something in language or on film: the writer builds up a full and fascinating portrait of a community.
Frequently in commercial travel photography time is very tight. The client is in a hurry or the budget is tight, the light, weather, and locations are all conspiring to put the clamp on the shoot. So it is that often times you get what you get and have to work with it as best you can.
Though there can be, has to be, good imagery that comes from those realities I always am seeing people and places that I would like to return to and explore more in depth. Some times I have to return as there just is no flexibility in the schedule. Other times I can steal some time with a subject, during a meal break, or in transit form one location to another.
It is such a special moment when I can spend time with someone and get them comfortable in front of the camera and we, as it is always a collaboration, can start to really discover who we are.
Here are a few souls that I have had the opportunity to spend some time to try and capture their portrait.
“Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to the world... Every so often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.”
― Irving Penn
“When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.”
― Pablo Picasso
“My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.”
― Helmut Newton
“I do have my own personal convictions and values, and I live by those. But as an artist, as a portrait photographer, my job is to tell the truth and to capture someone's spirit on a certain day. And it's never the whole truth; it's the truth I experience in a very intense and intimate fashion.”
― Platon
“I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.”
― Annie Leibovitz
“A true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, the Testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he was.”
― Philippe Halsman
“A journalist is supposed to present an unbiased portrait of an event, a view devoid of intimate emotions. This is impossible, of course. The framing of an image, by its very composition, represents a choice. The photographer chooses what to show and what to exclude.”
― Alexandra Kerry
The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.
― Berenice Abbott
“
The dog is the perfect portrait subject. He doesn't pose. He isn't aware of the camera.”
― Patrick Demarchelier
“The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“I always wanted to be the underdog. For me, as a portrait photographer, it's the kiss of death to become well known. I did my best work when no one knew who I was. People weren't threatened by me because they didn't think I was a big deal.”
― Platon
“To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.”
― Alexander Smith
“The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.”
― Jacob Epstein
“A good portrait is incredibly hard to create, there is too much temptation to pander to the individual rather than portray them as they really were.”
― Philippe Halsman
“Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”
― Samuel Butler
“I've never taken a photograph of someone and created a persona, I've just discovered what was already there.”
― Anthony Farrimond
“Slow down, take time, allow yourself to be wildly diverted from your plan. People are the soul of the place; don't forget to meet them and enjoy their company as you explore a place.”
― David duChemin
“By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.”
― Sigmar Polke
“when you take a photograph of someone, you take a portrait of their soul”
― Winna Efendi
“We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.”
― Pamela Hansford Johnson
“The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.”
― Nadar
“In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.”
― Annie Leibovitz
“Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.”
― John Singer Sargent
“A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound.”
― Charles Baudelaire
“There is no single form or style of portraiture. Portraiture means individualism and as such means diversity, self-expression, private point of view. The most successful images seem to be those which exist on several planes at once and which reflect the fantasy and understanding of many.”
― Peter Bunnell
“I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.”
― Frida Kahlo
I look forward to seeing you out there….
Thank you,
Julian Ray
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please leave a comment.
If you like what you see. Don’t like what you see. Want to offer a critique. Have a story or an image (or more) on the same subject that you would like to share, please do. I would enjoy hearing form you.
Previous Entry <--------- Blog Home ------------> Next Entry