The Photographer’s Gaze

Following on from the last comment under Project 5, I have just finished a first read through of ‘Train Your Gaze’ by Roswell Angier.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Train-Your-Gaze-Theoretical-Introduction/dp/294037337X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289916049&sr=1-1

A useful read that warrants further study, the book is subtitled ‘A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography’, which sums it up succinctly.  It is not (and I never expected it to be) a manual on how to take portraits; and it is quite a wide-ranging, free-ranging book, which will require more careful reading and analysis in order to fully appreciate its messages.  But it is certainly authoritative, contemporary (though wide-ranging enough to look across the scope of photographic history), provoking and challenging, with ‘assignments’ that, if one had the time and inclination, would definitely open up new possibilities.  It also, to my mind, communicates at a ‘personal’, practical level, though willingly embracing more complex theoretical concepts.  It irritated me from time to time – seemingly dismissive of Gregory Crewdson, for example, and elsewhere, putting a different (and potentially contradictory) interpretation on the detail of Jeff Wall’s ‘Mimic’ compared to Michael Fried and even the artist himself.  But those are minor, irritating (to me, that is) details.  I have already got plenty from the book and will get more with further attention.

The main reason for mentioning it here is to pick up on some early definitions or points made about the concept of ‘the gaze’ in a photographic context.  The ‘characteristic’ that defines the presence of the photographer’s gaze is ‘... the felt activity of someone looking, the photographer in person, embedded in the photograph’ (page 1).  And, a little later, when discussing Richard Avedon’s approach to making portrait images, Angier says:

‘The photographer’s eye here does not seek merely to represent.  It looks to persuade.’ (Page 5)

It is the very clear statement of the proactive role of the photographer that I find interesting.  Even this early in the course, photographing family and friends, I am conscious of the need to develop this ‘looking’ and to learn how to ‘embed’ it into my portrait images.  I have spent twenty years in recruitment, and long since developed a technique of interviewing that, I think, successfully ‘persuaded’ my interviewees to demonstrate to me their capabilities and their shortcomings.  I can see some parallels – though I don’t yet have the equivalent technique for portrait-making.  Angier describes Avedon’s ‘rumoured’ approach, in which he did not speak to the subject throughout the whole session, but I don’t think that is for me!  However, I can see how, with practice, one can develop a process that is flexible enough to work with different people in different circumstances, just as with interviewing.

Project 05: Eye-contact and expresssion

This project requires the photographer to shoot a portrait session, with face prominent, in which the subject is directed to at times look towards the camera and at others to ‘look away’.  I spent around 30-40 minutes, with Tim as my subject, and took around 50 different images in that period, from which I have selected 10 to illustrate the outcomes.

These first three images all have Tim looking directly towards the camera, the first with the body more or less square on to the camera, and the others with the body turned slightly left and right.

It is obvious, in all three, that the subject is aware of being photographed and that he is therefore ‘posed’ to some degree, though all three appear reasonably ‘relaxed’ and ‘natural’.  The viewer is immediately aware of the eye-contact, which engages his/her attention, though there might be very slight differences of expression that could lead to slightly different interpretations of the subject’s mood, intention, or whatever.

In the next batch, I have asked Tim to look away from the camera, whilst essentially maintaining a ‘neutral’ expression.  It seems harder for the viewer to understand these images.  They are posed and they look posed, but without the direct eye-contact, it is difficult to tell how engaged the subject is with the process, and for the viewer to engage with the subject.  They seem much less ‘personal’.  We feel much more comfortable judging facial expression when we have eye-contact with the subject.  At the specific level, the second image (top right) feels the most natural to me, and I think it is because Tim is leaning slightly into the direction that he is looking, with his head turned that way.

I know Tim well, and we engaged in plenty of conversation during the session – sometimes as I gave ‘stage direction’ and sometime just general ‘chat’.  I wanted to capture some less posed images and, using the cable release, pressed the shutter several times when Tim was not concentrating on ‘the pose’ (something he was perfectly aware of, of course).  We also, at one point, sought to simulate the ‘interview’ situation, looking to get a more absorbed version of the look away from camera.  Some of the results follow.

The first is directly comparable to the first of the previous four, with Tim sitting in more or less the same position.  The difference is that we have engaged in ‘banter’ that has brought a natural smile to Tim’s face.  Although he is looking away from the camera and the viewer does not have eye-contact, it feels much easier to engage with him as a subject in this image.

The second of this batch, below, is the one simulating an interview.  The subject’s face is turned more away from camera in this than in any of the others, but he looks absorbed because he is actually looking at me sitting out of frame to the left.  He doesn’t have eye contact with the camera, but he does have eye contact with me, resulting in a much more natural and less posed image than ‘gazing into the distance’.

Finally, the image below is probably the least ‘posed’ of all.  Again, we are sharing a joke, and I can tell from Tim’s body position that it is one the earlier shots, when he was sitting more or less directly facing the camera and we were shooting images of him look directly at it.  I am standing slightly left of camera and he has looked at me whilst laughing.  Once again, a viewer is likely to find it easier to engage with this image than with, say, the first of the previous batch of four, even though the subject is looking in more or less the same direction, from more or less the same position.

The project builds well on the previous ones, particularly with regard to communication between photographer and subject.  There is much more to directing a successful portrait than asking the subject to look one way or another!

Thanks, Tim, it was a very useful session.

 

Project 4: An active portrait

The brief for this project is to capture a subject absorbed in some activity (not necessarily an activity involving a lot of movement – the emphasis is on absorption).  The objective is to concentrate on ‘the person and the facial expression’.  Jayne is my subject again, and I have photographed her working on a quilted table-runner – a sewing project, in other words.

One of the challenges was to actually manage to photograph the face at all.  A number of factors came into play here – some of the activity takes place in a corner of a small room where it is not easy to set up a camera angle on the face, as illustrated below.



This image works well as a portrait – the lighting, the colours, the hand position, the compositional line between gaze and activity.  There is probably just enough of the face visible to demonstrate a level of concentration and absorption, but the full facial expression has to be left to the imagination.  The hair falling over the face is obviously another contributory factor, but so is the need to look downwards when concentrating in this way – something that would be common to many such portraits.

Whilst working at the sewing machine, Jayne occasionally looked away to examine the work, and I tried to use that opportunity to get more of her face in frame.

Once again, the image works well, with lighting, composition, and body position all adding to a successful illustration of her absorption in the task, but the full facial expression is still missing.

Moving away from the sewing machine to work at a table gave more opportunity to vary the camera angles.

Shooting with the camera hand-held and lower produced the image above.  Lighting is from afternoon sunlight through the window, which has certainly contributed to making this an attractive portrait, but the composition also works well – the circle of hands/arms/head/hair, the colour of the pin cushion in the foreground, the highlighting of the two key points of interest i.e. face and activity, the reflections in the table top.  But the full facial expression is still missing.

Finally, by moving to another angle and waiting until Jayne need to look in my direction, I got the following image.

As an attractive, well-composed portrait, it probably works less well that the others, but it does successfully capture her facial expression, fully-absorbed in the activity.

Thanks again for your patience, Jayne.

Project 03: Experimenting with light

This is, potentially, a very open-ended project; there being so many variations on experimentation with light, both natural and photographic.  The brief seems to steer us towards the use of natural light, and that is, largely, the approach that I have taken.  Artificial light is present in only two of the images presented below, and only at a very minimal level in one of those.  That said, I have often used flash, both on and off camera, in the past to photograph people, still life compositions etc.

The first two portraits are taken indoors, in natural light that is coming from behind the camera, but from French windows that mean it is broadly spread.  It was a dull, cloudy day, so the light is quite ‘white’, being reflected from light clouds, and is well-diffused.  I also chose to use black velvet for the background.  The subject normally wears glasses and I initially took photographs without them, in order to simplify the framing and composition as much as possible, but she also asked me to take some with the glasses on, so I have included both examples here.

This is probably as simple a lighting situation as one could get, and the outcome is a very ‘neutral’ effect – quite a ‘flat’ image, little sense of form because there isn’t a great deal of light and shade.  Some might say that there is too much of the ‘passport’ photo about these, but of course this neutrality is actually very much in line with many contemporary portraitists e.g. Rineke Dijkstra, where there is an attempt strip away the dramatic lighting and concentrate on recording what was there.

The next two are similar, being taken indoors in natural, diffused soft light, but this time there is more direction to the light – from the left side of the frame.  The side lighting creates more contrast of light and shade, highlighting more of the texture and form in the subject e.g. in the hair and the contours of the face.  The portraits probably have more ‘interest’, a little more sense of ‘drama’ – albeit the lighting here is still relatively soft.  Introducing strong photographic lighting in a similarly directional fashion would have an even more dramatic effect.

Once again, there is an image with glasses and one without.  Interesting – the portraits without are simpler to make.  For example, the one above right originally had a distortion of the edge of the face where it appears through the spectacle lens on the left of the frame, which I have corrected in Photoshop.  Now, some people who wear spectacles all the time are probably not going to want to have their portrait taken without them because they might feel it is ‘not them’, but others may welcome their removal.  They certainly make the process more complicated.

Now to another image taken in soft diffused lighting on a dull day; this time out of doors.

There are similarities with the first two images above but, being outside, the light is brighter and coming from above (reflected light from a covering of white/grey cloud), so there is less light getting into the eyes and there is a small amount of shadow below the cheekbones.  Getting light into the eyes is certainly one of the challenges in this type of situation, and I have actually used a very small amount of (on camera) flash to help the situation, which has also caught a small amount of highlighting in the eyes.

The next image makes rather more use of ‘fill flash’.  The sun was bright late on an autumn morning, but I wanted to try a portrait against this well lit ‘golden’ background, with the subject actually in deep shade, under a tree.  The advantage of shooting in the shade is that she is not affected by the brightness of the sun, but matching exposure in the shade with this bright background would have been very difficult, so I have used a considerable amount of flash to illuminate the face, enabling a relatively fast shutter speed of 1/125^th second, which retains some detail in the bright background.  The effect is perhaps unusual, but I think it works well, and it would have been impossible to achieve without the use of the artificial light.

We did have several attempts to take portraits in bright sunlight, but it was very hard for my subject to either look towards the sun so that we could get some light into the eyes, or for me to expose in such a way as to get detail into the eyes.

This is as close as we got, and the difference is that it was taken late in the afternoon, when the sun was lower and less strong.  She is still having to struggle to keep her eyes open in the bright light, but there is enough detail to make the portrait work and, combined with the wind ruffling her hair (on the beach) it does give the portrait a very natural and informal look.  It is also shot from above in order to again maximise the opportunity to get light into the eyes.

Many thanks to Jayne for her patience, especially when we were trying to work in bright light.

 

Brighton Photo Biennial

Last weekend, I visited Bexhill & Brighton to take in a number of the exhibitions at the Brighton Photo Biennial Festival.  Stating the obvious, it was a great pleasure to spend two days viewing the work of, in total, within the time I could manage, around 23 photographers - mainly contemporary, but also some 'heros' from the past e.g. Walker Evans in 'Myth, Manners and Memory' at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill.

http://www.dlwp.com/WhatsOn/ExhibitionDetail.aspx?EventId=1299

This exhibition features work from six American photographers, focusing on images of the American South, including work from William Eggleston, Alec Soth, William Christenberry, Susan Lipper and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as Evans.  The visit was especially good because on Saturday afternoon there was the opportunity to walk around in a small group led by the two curators who had put the exhibition together - Celia Davies from Photoworks and Jane Won from the De La Warr Pavilion.  In the context of 'People & Place', there were several interesting aspects:

• large prints of portraits by Eggleston that I had certainly never come across before - some uncompromisingly vivid images (very Eggleston) of 'characters' from the South;
• 'staged' portraits by Susan Lipper, made with the local inhabitants of a small town in the Appalachian Mountains, that were intriguingly ambiguous  - hard to tell whether they were presenting caractures of themselves, representational images of what life was like in that isolated community, or just p***-taking;
• sometime disturbing images from Alec Soth's Southern roadtrips;
• dreamlike self-portraits by Carri Mae Weems, in which she placed herself (and by association the viewer) into Southern locations that evoke the South's sometimes questionable past - almost always back to the camera, facing into the image, as if standing in for the viewer;
• and two classic Walker Evans portraits of Southern sharecroppers - Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs.

There was lots or portraiture else where in the Brighton event and its Fringe e.g. Molly Landreth's images of the gay & lesbian community in 'Queer Brighton' and Oumar Ly's black & white 'studio' portraiture from a village in Senegal in the 1960s and 70s.  But I was particularly struck by Suzanne Opton's work on soldiers and veterans from recent US wars.

http://suzanneopton.com/

Her images of 'vets' draped in blankets were especially good, for me.  They seemed to lie somewhere between/amongst classic paintings of warriors, photographs of refugees, religious images.  Once again, it made me think about the 'process' of making someone's portrait - the communication between the photographer and the subject & just how crucial that is.  I wanted to be a 'fly on the wall' when she was working with these guys and to understand just what she said to them to bring out the expressions and impressions that they created together.

Hotshoe Magazine Oct-Nov 2010

Two interesting and relevant articles from the most recent edition of Hotshoe.

http://www.hotshoeinternational.com/

The first, 'Comfort Women', is represented on the cover that should be viewable by the link above.  Written by Bill Kouwenhoven, it illustrates and reviews the series of portraits, made in recent years, by Jan Benning, of 'Comfort Women' from Japanese Occupied Indonesia in WWII.  The subject matter is sad and disturbing, but that is not for this post.  I really wanted to comment on the portrait-making,

• The writer's opening says 'It is the eyes that get you at first ...', which is exactly the comment I made about the portraits of Steve McCurry.  Benning's portraits, several of which are reprinted in full A4 page size in the magazine, are all head and shoulders framing; full face to the camera; looking, without any distinctive expression, deadpan in effect, straight back at the viewer.  They appear to have been lit from above and behind the camera, down onto the women's faces.
• It is indeed the stares that get you, all different but all challenging the viewer in a similar way, and then it is the 'every detail' in the faces that expand the story - all of them with, for me, an elegance and dignity that pays tribute to their strength and stoicism, albeit the accompanying personal stories demonstrate the price they have all paid for the abuse they suffered all those years ago.
• As portraits, they are stunning, complex, and even beautiful.  They cannot, in effect, be viewed in isolation from the background, despite what I said above, but they do, I think, deserve the use of words such as elegance and beauty.

Then there is and article about Brian Griffin, written by Miranda Gavin, in the context of the 'Face to Face: A Retrospective' exhibition in Birmingham, and some of his portraits appearing in the'Road to 2012' exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.  I'm not looking to pick out too much from this article, but 'Portraiture is an immensely difficult genre and hugely underrated' is worth repeating.  With 40+ years experience behind him he should know what he's talking about.  He doesn't believe that a lot of people apply themselves to portraits in a 'considered way' and with enough 'energy and interest'.  He doesn't rate the Taylor Wessing portrait competition - '.. it's pretty awful, really.'  The more recent portraits, mainly groups, illustrated in the article have a 'staged' look about them, and he describes them as 'very TV, very filmic'.  Certainly they are very different from those of Jan Benning!

Project 02: Thinking about location

The first stage of this Project is to research potential locations for interesting 'whole body or torso' portraits.  I have been carrying the compact camera with me on a few walks in and around Holmfirth, and keeping a watchful eye has proved fruitful. Reference images have been taken of a number of possibilities for suture use, but here are the six selected for the project - looking to demonstrate some variety in the selection.

Location 1

Situated on a footpath by the River Holme, this is the back of a derelict mill.  There are a number of these peeling drainpipes, which as well as providing colour and interest in their own right have the potential for marked textural contrast with human skin.  The area is shaded, so light might be a problem, and there are tall trees on a hillside opposite, so whatever sunlight does get through will be 'dappled'.  The river is behind the camera position, so stepping back to get a full length portrait might require care (or a diving suit), but torso to head and shoulders will work OK.

Location 2

This is further along the footpath from the first location and offers a good possibility for full length or torso level images.  The 'platform' is steel and solid, so safe for the subject, despite being right by the river.  This shot is taken from some steps that lead up from the river bank, offering an interesting camera angle, either for a subject looking upwards or for a view down onto a subject standing, looking into the water, for example.  There is also space to the right of this view, for a more level camera angle.  Light might again be an issue, but there is likely to be direct sun at some times of day.

Location 3

This location is close to the centre of Holmfirth and offers a number of possibilities - the corner between wall and building; the window or the wall as background; looking down at camera from the metal rail above the wall; and even some steps in the background.  Light is likely to be consistently shaded, so soft for portrait making, and there are firm surfaces where a tripod could be used, if required.

Location 4

I saw this location as having the potential for something a bit different - walking towards camera down the cobbled slope, for example, or leaning moodily against the wall on the left.  This is definitely a shady spot (by which I mean it lacks light, not that it is dangerous!), so some flash might be necessary to get light into the subject's face.

Location 5

Located in a small park close to the town centre, this location is potentially quite complex, in terms of the background, but at the right time of year, could offer good colour and framing for either ful mength or torso length images.  The light is generally good (this shot having been taken with the camera facing more or less due South), with possibiltities for shooting from either side of the archway.

Location 6

This park/play area, a little way up the valley side and overlooking Holmfirth, provides interesting possibilities for scenic background, with the metal railings on the right providing somewhere for the subject to stand, but also for sitting and even lying on the metal seats (at the right time of year!).  It might also work well for group shots.  Probably the main problem with this and the previous location is that this is a popular area at weekends and the the previous is something of a thoroughfare.  It would be important to pick the right time of day to avoid continual interruption, or creating a nuisance for other users.

I have chosen to present some images at Location 2 for this project.

The location has worked well for both full length and torso images, and has provided two different camera angles.  The background works successfully in providing context, contrast and interest, without detracting from the main focus of the portrait.  We also tried a few variations of stance, hand positions etc.

Thanks to Isobel for modelling so well.