Portraits and happy accidents.

I have been thinking about making portraits. Probably because I have been following Alec Soth's blog religiously lately. But mostly because I have never really dealt with the problem. Too scared to tell people what to do, too uncertain of what I want them to do.

Soth, August Sanders, Reneke Dijkstra, and Marcella Hackbardt (a friend from graduate school) all come to mind as photographers making portraits I admire - letting the portraits be straightforward, asking the subjects to address the camera. The images all play with that peculiarly photographic trait of believability, as if we are seeing an honest presentation of the self of the subject. I also enjoy the unadorned compositional choices. The subject isn't cropped, the setting is as telling as the person in the photograph and everything is placed right in the middle of the frame. Probably taken with a 4x5 and not a DSLR. Honest. Pragmatic.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I finished a 4x5 demo for my intermediate photography class and had a look at the Polaroids. This image floated out of the bunch, there were a couple of others too. Goo on the Polaroid back's rollers and poor focus aside, all the potential was present. It's as if the secret is setting up the camera and letting it sit in plain view for an hour, so that people forget it's in the room. Oh yeah, and having the power to grade them down if they don't participate.

For what its worth, a show put together by the George Eastman House came through the University of Michigan Museum of Fine Arts last year that was an overview of the history of photography. The representative image by August Sander was Bricklayer's Mate. I was shocked to get my nose up to the plexi and see how overtly the image had been manipulated and retouched. I seem to recall almost a quarter of the image being painted in black to get the luscious shadow in the negative space. I don't know why I would think that a turn-of-the-twentieth-century German photographer would be accountable to the expectations of F64, but it caught me off guard.