27.05.11
Martin Middlebrook: Five great lies of portrait photography
This month professional photographer Martin Middlebrook takes a look at the elements that make great portrait images and explains how and why you should break all the commonly perceived rules.
Everyone is at it, the world is being catalogued a million times a second. We are harnessing technology like never before, quenching our thirst to capture our lives, the lives of others, the holidays we take and the events we attend. Like an unstoppable lava flow we click, click, click and never stop to wonder why. What is our purpose, what is our reasoning and our aim, why are we doing it? And at the heart of what we photograph are people; the people of our lives, our family and friends, children and colleagues. Portraits indeed, but often portraits without any purpose other than simply to remember.
When we think of portraits, we have a clear picture in our mind of what that represents and what it does not, what constitutes a true portrait and what doesn’t. But are we right? In all this snapping are we doing the genre full justice? When I flick through the pages of the numerous photographic magazines that fill the shelves at my newsagent’s, I am struck by how the vast majority of the portrait images fall into two distinct groups – serious studio studies of famous people taken by pros, or semi-clad women in derelict stately homes taken by rampant amateurs.
I would proffer the simple thesis that this rather neglects the substantial potential that exists within the genre. This article is entitled Five Great Lies of Portrait Photography, which is a stretch, but it alludes to the fact that we manifestly do not maximise the possibilities that are laid out before us, each and every day.
1. Street photography is dead... No, you just need courage.
If we consider street photography, received wisdom has it that it is a dying genre, harking back to gentler times. Its ’death’ has certainly accounted for many column inches this past year, we have left it to fester and die like a sick anachronism. Somehow we accept this untruth, because we have been told that great street photography is not possible in this protective, litigious society any more, but this is a fear invoked by the fun police.
The only thing that prevents us from producing masterful works that chronicle the real Britain is our own lack of courage. Street photography is about confidence and courage, about people skills and, perhaps more philanthropically, about collecting the truth. But nothing binds random pixels together more fluently, nothing ’snapshots’ more agreeably the narrative of a passing moment than the dynamics created by letting reality order our pixels for us. Why this desire to have control over all the elements? Why this regimental productivity? Why not see what happens by chance? We are all different in our triggers, our sensibilities. I have done studio and street, and nothing exhilarates me more than a timely confluence of elements that we couldn’t anticipate and manage, there is nothing more naturally satisfying.
2. Portrait photography is about faces... No, it’s about other things too!
It seems obvious, but taking a person‘s portrait is not just about their face. The question we have to ask ourselves is what facet of a person, their life and their environment will best represent them in the light we wish them to be seen? Sometimes we have to be a little more lateral and a lot less literal. A person’s visage may tell us a lot less about a person than some other intrinsically more telling facet. In fact appearance is mostly a lie, our language is full of metaphors that support this view, ’never judge a book by its cover’ being just one. Here is an image of a child‘s hand and another of his foot. We don’t have to look very hard and for very long to compile our own narrative. This child is poor, homeless, hungry and begging. If I had shown you a photograph of his face you may well have assumed otherwise, because it was clean and he was smiling. Crop carefully and you would have had no sense of the daily anguish of his life. We get a lot closer to the truth and we have hastened this reality by choosing to illustrate those more telling facets. As portraits go, it portrays the subject in an immediate, defined and honest fashion.
The back of someone‘s head may tell us more about a person than the front. It may be the car they drive or the food they consume, the TV shows they watch, the company they keep or the pets they own. We may find out more about a person than merely seeking out their soul by peering into windowless eyes. So next time you contemplate taking a photograph of someone you know, think about a more nuanced approach, think about what makes them singularly different from everyone else you know, and photograph that bit of them instead.
3. Subjects should fill the frame... Not always, context is sometimes everything.
I have in my hand a small compendium book of this year’s winners of the BP Portrait Award. Packed full of ravishingly stunning paintings, it provides proof that so much endeavour is still capable of enriching our world. I have leafed through the pages of this book again and again, and stared devotedly at all the paintings on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London. I have my personal favourites, of course, I oscillate between paintings that demonstrate technical skills beyond comprehension, to the vague abstract that hints and suggests without delivering everything we might hanker after. But the one that really stands out for me is called Love Painting – Portrait of My Wife Jackie and My Cat Amy, Redbrick Mill Studio, by Tony Noble.
I love it because his wife and cat seem somewhat incidental in telling the whole story. The picture provides perhaps 100 clues as to who this person is, where they live, what they do for a living and their likes and dislikes. It is 975sq cm packed full of facts, details and embellishments that tell a vivid and compelling story. There is a Morrisons bag on the floor so we know where the artist shops, we can see what song is playing on the iPod so we get a sense of his tastes, a cup of tea rests on a desk and a stack of picture frames leans against a wall. The artist‘s wife is resting upon a stool, a beaten-up, falling-apart tubular construction. It has been with the artist since art school... is what you think ...and they will bury it with him!
So I have now formed a detailed narrative of this person‘s very being, and I may be completely wrong, but my truth is closer to their truth for having so much to call upon. Frankly, if I am completely wrong, it matters not because it has allowed me a magic carpet ride through another’s world. Photography can do this too, portrait photography should strive to do this more often. Often we do want to strip our subjects back to nothing, clutter distracts us from getting to know the subject. But sometimes detail is not clutter, sometimes it is a supporting ? trellis for the story to clamber up. I believe that artists do this better than photographers because they construct their images, whereas we often just press a shutter on a whim.
On pages 68 and 69 is a picture taken at a wedding I recently shot. If we care to look there are plenty of revealing facts and some misleading aspects as well, but we might imagine that the catcher of the bouquet is less-than-thrilled, anxious and embarrassed, that those who know her also know something about her trials and tribulations in love, because their response is so rapturous. We see two RAF officers in the background, so is it a military wedding? But, then again, there is a guy in a straw boater and a striped blazer, very Oxford. I’ll leave it there, but I will say one final thing, the subject exists in our minds because she is part of a connected series of dots, and not because she is the dot!
Oh, and sometimes calling your painting Love Painting – Portrait of My Wife Jackie and My Cat Amy, Redbrick Mill Studio is so much more helpful than the enigmatic Untitled moniker of the enigmatic artist.
4. Portraits are about the subject... No, they can be just as much about the photographer.
I feel fundamentally connected to this image (above), taken at this year’s Notting Hill Carnival, in a way that I don’t with the other images used in this article. A photograph of a person looking at a photograph of me taking a photograph of them. Photographs are about how we see the world, be that travel, still life or portrait photography. In doing so we are imprinting our perception of our world, or stamping our style upon the subject. But, whichever it is, the photographer is as important as the subject. Our ability to connect with our subject, the choice of styling, the information we include or leave out, and many more aspects are all set by us, and the resulting final image is testament to that filtering process.
I often shoot with the sun behind me, which means that inevitably my shadow falls across the frame, often joining up directly with the subject. It’s something I like to do, it’s my way of being there, and it shows a very real connection with the process of getting an image. Sometimes I use long lenses to shoot candidly, making sure I have no outward influence on the subject, but sometimes I deliberately activate the subject so as to energise a shot.
Sometimes I leave everything as I found it, but sometimes I will add or take away something that implies this, that or the other. Sometimes I add lighting, sometimes not, I will use technology where it suits and leave it out where it does not.
But all these decisions are your decisions, they are more important than the subject, make-up, ’that look’ and so on. They are the things we perceive the most in the finished image, but see the least. The photographer is more important than the subject.
5. Portraits are about people... No, portraits can portray anything.
We tend to use the genre of portrait photography in a very limited sense, photographing those around us. But portraiture can be used for anything. I searched Wikipedia and it expresses the idea that portrait photography is about photographing people. Well I don’t agree, it can surely be a portrayal of anything we choose that has an intrinsic capturable quality, otherwise the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition wouldn’t have a portrait section. I am not sure how far you can stretch the term ’portrait’, but I am pretty sure I have taken portraits of trees, leaves, fields of corn and other herbaceous events. Better still, when we photograph a farmer with his cattle on his farm in the Lake District, can we definitively say it is a portrait of a farmer, or a dairy farm, or a portrait of people at work, or indeed a portrayal of the landscape of England? Because surely it is all of these things and more. So my call to action, as it were, is to broaden our interpretation of the genre of portrait photography, to see how far we might reasonably redraw the boundaries of acceptability. In doing so I am equally sure that we might explore our subjects more creatively and our resulting images will more fully reflect that journey.
In conclusion:
I often feel we pay too much attention to tight definitions of how things should be, how things have always been, and thus how they will continue to be. I think we should all learn the basics of anything we endeavour to accomplish, but once we have done so, we should kick a big hole in that little box, open our eyes wide and go and explore a while. Throw out all the rules, ignore what we have been taught to believe is correct and redefine our own style. Otherwise we are simply doing what everyone else does and the world is not short of predictable images. Exploring our own styles, throwing out the book and making brash impetuous decisions often lead us down fulfilling paths that we could never have dreamed of, and in doing so I firmly believe we become richer for it, and better photographers to boot!
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