Sometimes, They're Sorry They Said "Yes"

We stop lots of people in the street and ask them to pose. We get very few turn downs. Occasionally, a person will agree to stand for a portrait but it becomes clear that they are uncomfortable and regret that they said "yes." Claudia, a young woman in Lisbon, is a good example. We asked her to pose because we liked her serene, attractive face. It was obvious, however, that she was observably uncomfortable in front of the camera: her face is set in a tight, tense mask, her body and left hand are tense, and her balled up right hand is another give away to how she's feeling. I guess, once she had committed herself, she was too polite to back out. Sometimes, it's really okay for a person to say, "I think I made a mistake. I'd really rather not." It's a pity, though; the geometry of the composition and the picture's tones work splendidly, in my opinion.

Men & Women

These two portraits were made moments apart outside a military police station in Lisbon. Neither of these twenty-four year-old police officers spoke English, so they posed themselves without any influence from me. Although they are both "police," I really like the distinctions they brought to bear in their stance, their sense of identity and role, and their presence. In a way, it is quintessential male and female.

Tomas

Angela

Groups

Photographing a single person is difficult enough, photographing a group can be damn near impossible.

This group of women waiting at the health clinic in Larreynaga Nicaragua was a pure gift. (Especially so since this image was shot using a 4x5.) Not only did the composition form itself without any intervention from me, each woman is totally absorbed either in her own thoughts or on her baby. Every woman with the baby could be its own image, yet taken together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Some days, ya just get lucky...

One Moment in Time, Multiple Views

The photo of me at the top of the blog was taken in 1992 in Larreynaga, Nicaragua. I've forgotten who actually made the photo, but the image was made at virtually the same moment I made this portrait of Uriel.

It fascinates me that the same moment of time, depicting spatial relationships from two distinct perspectives, has been preserved on film. While Uriel is looking straight at you, look at the top of the page and view him and the rest of the scene from the side. I find the relational layers of that moment, and noticing to what each person was attending, particularly intriguing: Uriel is relating to me and the camera, I am relating to him, one boy to my side is looking at me, one partially hidden boy is looking at the camera that captured the larger picture, another child is peering in Uriel's direction while two children are attending to something off to their left, as is the woman on the far right. And now, twenty-three years after that frozen moment shot from two angles, you are looking at all of us.

Backstory

Rod Stewart sang, "Every Picture Tells a Story." The question that remains to be asked, however, is what story, specifically? Let's take the pictures of Max and Jolie, for example.

While we were making portraits one day  last November, I noticed Max making pictures of us and the view camera with his cell phone (which is not an unusual occurrence). After about ten minutes, he approached us and struck up a conversation. It turns out that he's a photographer as well, from Italy. We liked his funky look and style, so we asked him to pose.

Standing off to the side was Max's lovely girlfriend, Jolie. So while Max sat and compose some thoughts for us, we got to work photographing Jolie.

After completing her portrait and having her write to the prompt "What's life like for you right now?", we engaged both of them a bit further in conversation. It turns out that they were planning to marry in Miami in a few weeks. He, a 42 year-old divorcé, and she a Jewish twenty-five year-old. Her family is not thrilled, she told us; but love will out.

Viewing the pictures independently, and without the context of the romantic backstory, their pictures "read" a certain way. Now that you have a little insight about the people, do the pictures tell a very different story? I think so.

Work That Holds Over Time

At the end of the week we'll be traveling to Oaxaca, Mexico to visit an old friend, Kathy, and her husband, Alan. As we were preparing for the trip, I looked through an old portfolio in hopes of finding a portrait that I had made of Kathy back in 1992. Not only did I find it, I was pleased to discover that the image has really held up over time. By that I mean, even though my large format portraiture has evolved over the years, this early effort with the 4x5 is still viable, and still reflects my intention to create a relationship with the sitter. It still works.

The Trajectory of My Career

This is the trajectory of my photographic career!

(With thanks to @ChrisSullivanNZ on Twitter)

Details

When I shoot portraits, I'm usually drawn to a person's overall presence and I pay limited attention to the details.

Here's an example of reveling in details after the fact:

This is a portrait of Magali Pozo, a twenty-four year-old who lives in Larreynaga, Nicaragua. Although I carefully composed the picture so that she would be framed in the doorway, I didn't really see the lovely interplay of shapes and textures such as the buttons on her blouse and the nailheads on the door, or how the split of the ponytail into two parts is repeated in the slits at the bottom of her blouse and is further repeated in the vertical lines of the pleats in her skirt. The textures on the right side of the image add interest, as well.

The most interesting detail for me, however, is something I totally missed at the time I made her portrait. In an environment where women work at demanding, physical labors every day, it's unusual for anyone to have such perfectly shaped and manicured fingernails.

Go Figure

I post many of my images on Flickr in order to share them and gain some feedback. One piece of feedback that helps me gauge the effectiveness of an image is the number of views, as well as the number of times a picture gets favorited. Sometimes, however, the feedback can be somewhat puzzling.

For example, I posted this image of Himiko taken last August in New York's East Village:

It's gotten a decent number of views as of yesterday, 3,891, and a modest amount of faves, 29, which is about average for my kind of work

We bumped into Himiko again at the end of November, and asked if we could make another picture. By November, I had abandoned the white seamless look and was shooting wide open in order to soften the background. This was the result:

As you can see I kept her written part of the diptych the same. The second image has garnered 12,750 views to date and a whopping (for me) 94 faves. While these are clearly two different looks of the same attractive woman, I'm hard pressed to understand the difference that made the difference between the two images.

Do you have any ideas?

Reciprocity Failure: Robert Kalman- Portraits Of NYC

Reciprocity Failure: Robert Kalman- Portraits Of NYC