Portraits

I read a NY Times article yesterday about popular surnames. Turns out Williams is the third most popular surname in American culture. Pretty wild. A lot of Williams out there.

So how do so many families from the same last names have such unique identities? It reminds me a bit of taking portraits. How do so many human bodies with so many of the same features generate such unique images?

The great part of taking pictures of people comes in the variety of human form. No one person is exactly like any other person. Their physical features and personalities range widely, and then you as a photographer can work to accent these things - bring them out with light, color, and environment.

One of the great basic tests of this comes in the form of a yearbook. Check out your yearbook from high school or junior high. The portrait settings for hundreds if not thousands of kids are exactly the same. The environment is set, creating the most base level photographic experience for everyone involved. Yet personalities still shine through. Timothy Greenfield Sanders and other great portrait photos often use the same techniques (at a much higher technical level, of course).

To me, however, I love concept-driven portraits. Images that capture the person, but bring out the qualities of their personality through props, locations and light. Annie Liebowitz is arguably the most well-known living master of this. Working for Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, she employed (usually) subtle metaphors for her subject's personality and dropped them in the photo. Combined with excellent technical ability, her photos bring out something much deeper than the aesthetic aspect alone. Something inside the soul of the picture.


I have included a couple of environmental portraits in this post. One uses make-up and costume, while the other is focused on the light of the subject.