Just Who Are We, Exactly?
Blue Girl
I'm reading a book by Martin Gayford called 'Man with a Blue Scarf - On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud'. It's a fascinating read because although it includes observations on the quirks of the painter, it is even more a study on the connection between an artist and his subject and the resulting piece being produced, which he calls the third person in the room.
The artist, Tom Lohner, and I are working on a portrait project that for lack of better words can be described as a kind of 3-dimensional discourse. It started with me trying to explain that I wanted to shoot glamour portraits, but that it was almost impossible for me to validate somebody from the outside only. I don't see people that way. It's concentrating too hard on what we pretty much cannot control, plus it doesn't validate all of the unique things that make us who we are. Tom understood this, and we came up with this idea of combining our work to reflect the whole person - beautiful, complicated, and terribly human both inside and out.
The portraits I'm making are more work than I've ever thought possible. At some point the third person in the room is my camera. As I've said before, there are times when I wonder where exactly I was when I was shooting a series, like the Lipizzaner horses. The photos are not what I was thinking about making, nor is it what I remember seeing. I am, like one of my favorite photographers, Sarah Moon, absolutely terrified most of the time, and almost embarrassingly certain I'm not getting anything usable.
Yet perhaps it can be said that as a photographer, if you can get into the zone, you drop almost into a state of meditation and push that button subconsciously. When you come up for air, something quite magical has taken place below the surface.
I am very happy with these portraits. They are glamorous, but they're my kind of glamour. The beauty who is a little out of focus. The buff who loses it for a split second between looking buff. Or the Caravaggio boy who, after posing for hours, cuts loose and starts to dance and sing to the camera. It's what attracts us and what draws us in to touch one another as human in some way. Recognizing the tremendous beauty in the flaws. Real life. True glamour.