Creating a Portrait
The Subjective /portraits.
Portraiture is an interpretive of the artist, the subject only becomes by whim of the artist. A process that starts with want becomes have and somewhere in the middle get makes an appearance to accomplish this transformation. The dynamic of get… You get the subject’s agreement for having their picture taken, you will the subject and camera to get something back… and… then… then you get to have it! In a portraiture session the artist has a universe of choice and the subject participates or not. Within this dynamic there is a play of power that allows for the portraitist to walk away with a have, I will write more about this in another post.
The portrait can’t escape the gravity of its own weight, and for me the snap comes at the moment of surrender. Surrender through connection and project a self into a record of that instance, it being a highly stylized image using elements to convey an emotive circumstance, or documenting an environmental depiction of the subject. In both cases elements become the portrait as much as the main subject in it, if present and not necessarily mutually excluding. And those elements are as much part of the portrait as the what is being revealed by a snap inside an intentional frame, these are just choices made, and in varying degrees the sum makes the portrait successful or not. The contents of frame can always be reduced to a subjective assessment of value, the choice is open to interpretation when the parts are scrutinized individually, and as a whole. What matters is the presence of the artist and the subject in the final image, all elements combine to give an impression that can or not be what was set out to do in the first place.
Thank you for the trust eBird!
Rhinebeck 3/1/2019