I’m doing a Full Portrait weekend at the LA Center for Photography, November 21-23. This post is the portrait chapter from my book, Looking Into The Light. It gives an idea of way that we’ll be approaching things.

 

Whenever it happened I’d know … the heart, there in the face. It was as though I’d leaned in to whisper something and found I suddenly couldn’t speak. There I’d be, drowning in their face while they looked back into a circle of dark glass. It felt like kissing a stranger, beautiful and frightening, both at once.

 

A portrait is not a headshot. It is an encounter, a wordless experience of another person that is made into an image.

 

I approach making a photograph of a person with both fear and exhilaration. I’ve learned that when those two states collide, something powerful can happen, something that takes me beyond control. I’ve traveled to Cuba, Italy, Egypt, and Uganda just to abandon myself to people, to gaze into the human face. It is an endless, bottomless project.

And it is your next assignment.

Notice I am circling around the word “portrait” here. I think it evokes a head-and-shoulders, right-hand-over-left kind of photo that aims to please. I want to get at something much fuller in my own work and in this exercise.

 

I also want us to work consciously with some of the things we explored in previous exercises—composition as an experience, light as energy, space as a ground on which something is inscribed. We can also draw on the kind of psychological insight we used when we looked at strangers and wrote their stories.

 

But this time there is a hugely important addition to the brief: to make this exercise work, you have to see the person in front of you and you have to let them see you too. That means that you simply have to be as present for them as you want them to be for you. No hiding behind the machine.

 

If this seems like a lot to keep track of, don’t try. Set your thoughts aside and just begin. That’s always a good way to pass obstacles. Go at the task with the same kind of thoughtless awareness that you used when you taped down your focus for the exercise in composition in Chapter Four. Just move and shoot, and keep doing it.

 

We are after a picture that leaves a person’s wholeness and complexity intact, even—especially—if it is contradictory, a picture that gives a viewer a more heightened and intensified sense of the person than he or she might get from them in person.

 

Why do portraits at all?

There are all kinds of reasons that the portrait has been one of the great themes of art and particularly of photography. One is that humans are quite fascinated by themselves. In his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, Matthew D. Lieberman says that for most human beings the activity that nearly everyone’s brain defaults to when it is not overtly engaged in some other activity is thinking about other people and our relationship to them.

 

I’m sure this is true of other animals too. Go to a dog park some time and watch. Then go from there right to a cocktail party or a gallery opening and see what’s going on. It will seem like a park where the dogs all drink white wine.

 

Now a few concrete considerations:

 

1. Who will you photograph?
2. Where will you photograph them?
3. What about the light?

 

Should you photograph someone you know or should it be a stranger? I’d say, do the stranger.

It may seem easier to ask people you know. Don’t do it. Friends will, after a short protest, say yes, but the thing is that they will want to look better than they really do…as do we all. And you will not want to risk friendship by failing to do that. But when you cover up the texture and contradictions, you’ll resolve and smooth over the very stuff that makes them interesting. Of course that stuff will probably show anyway, and your friends might be disillusioned with themselves and annoyed with you. It sounds odd to put it this way, but most of us would rather be illusioned.

 

If you’re in the portrait business, softening reality is acceptable, but if you’re after the stuff of art, the full-spectrum evocation of another human being, you are really after an unexpurgated view. It can even be loving, but if you prettify everything, the result is simply not interesting.

For example, the photograph of the confined prisoner in the portfolio that follows would undoubtedly not please his mother, but it really represents the man and gives a sense of where he is, with hints in his attitude of why he might be there. I didn’t try to relax him, I just jumped into doing it, and it is one of the strongest portraits I’ve ever done.

 

All of this is why I suggest that you approach and work with someone you don’t know at all, someone you don’t need to protect. You’ll avoid doing bland work and of risking the wrath of a friend. The time you spend with them will be an exploration. You will see more and take nothing for granted. The intensity will put you in a state of much greater alertness, and your subject too. I’m not saying to be cruel, just an honest witness.

 

Whomever you photograph, you will likely find that doing it makes for some tension. Good! Leave it there. It brings both you and your sitter to a kind of alertness. Don’t dissipate it, use it.

Then there is the question of where to work.

This is important: never simply photograph a person where they are when they said, Yes. Look around, in advance if possible, and find a “good” place, i.e., one that has graphic possibilities, some nice light and perhaps some clues about your subject. That might mean a room, it might mean outdoors, it might mean a circus tent or a theater dressing room or it might be just a few steps away, but you have to choose a place deliberately and then you have to ask your subject to move.

 

There could be some element in the frame that is associated with the person, such as the great black hulk of the piano in Arnold Newman’s photo of Stravinsky. But don’t rely on the shorthand of props or place to do your work. Everything in the frame—including the energy—has to be actively playing a part.

 

Intrude

People are often reluctant to ask a subject to move or change their shirt or take off their glasses or almost anything at all. They feel they are intruding…and indeed they are. When you ask to photograph someone, you are moving into their life but with their permission. When they say yes, that permission is granted, and now you are responsible for the whole outcome and all its elements. And that may mean moving the person into some good light, or away from a distracting background.   Look, if you go the dentist he’ll ask you to lie in the chair, and open your mouth. You don’t feel put-upon. It’s what he needs to do his work. People actually appreciate being managed when someone is making their portrait.

 

See the light

Light is a main player in any photograph. We did some exercises that were entirely about light, and from that you can understand that you may need to manage someone into a light that will do what you want. (As with the question of place, you may not necessarily have to move. The quality of the light on someone may be a part of what draws you. The prisoner, again, is an example. There was a window opposite the man that threw a cross light on his face, perfect as it was.)   I’m not talking about lighting here, I’m talking about light. By that I mean seeing light, as opposed to turning on lights. If is not where you are, go find it. I suggest you begin by looking near a window.   None of this means that you shouldn’t move a light or set up a strobe. But the best lighting comes from an understanding of how light works in the wild, so to speak, the complexity and imperfections. Imperfect light can be wonderful. You want to use the character of the light, not necessarily correct it.

 

And that’s all I’ll say about light at this point, except to point out that in the portfolio that follows, much of the light is natural…though it is often managed with reflectors, blockers, etc. These questions of subject, place, and light are secondary to that larger question we raised earlier: why do we make photographs of people at all?

 

Well, because we are endlessly enthralled by our own kind, as we saw. But I also think it is because doing a portrait gives us the power to create a being. Seriously. My picture of someone is my version of them, one that the subject and I create together.

 

Being with another person and making a portrait of them is intense, and we should leave it that way. If you want to look deeply at someone, understand that they will be looking into you too. This doesn’t necessarily mean gazing into each other’s eyes or having a long talk before you photograph. It can happen in an instant.

We don’t run all this through our minds when we photograph someone, but I think we do enter a complex resonance with them, a sense of some harmony we want to grasp…or some disharmony.

No writer ever writes about people who are perfect. Writers want life in full, not a denatured version. Same with the photographic portrait. The contradictions hint at the full complexity in someone who draws us. It offers the photographer the chance to take the person in and create a version that expresses the attractions that the he or she might not openly express. The connection can be done in a sixtieth of a second, but it suggests the fullness that is there before and after that moment.

 

So we’ve looked at some of the considerations that let you make an image of a whole person. To sum up, when you go at it:

 

1. Find someone who is interesting to you, someone you want to know more about.
2. Commit to seeing into them deeply, as deeply as you can, just as they are. You can heighten what you see, but don’t alter it.
3. Take charge of the setting and light, clothing, props.
4. To these I’d add one more: don’t be polite, be honest.

 

 

The Big Secret

Once you have settled these things, then let everything go. Allow photographs to emerge, to go beyond your ideas. Afterward, going through what you’ve done, you may come across a picture that stuns. That’s the one you were after all along.

 

Looking at your portraits

Time for the critique, no less daunting if you’re critiquing yourself. A few things to remember:

 

The purpose is not to nail things down, fit them in, or pull them apart. It is to open them up and see what you’ve done from many angles, to understand what you saw, and what you made of it.

 

And if you can, look at your pictures as if they were someone else’s.   I edit by going through my files quite quickly, at about the speed people skim a magazine at, and I rank anything that catches my eye as a #2. Next, I make a further pass to refine my choices, promoting those that seem more complex and resonant to a ranking of #3.

 

Now I put the whole take aside for a while, and return later, looking for the ones that leap out. Only then do I work with some files to really refine them (trying not to overdo the refinements). If you work this way consciously you’ll find that you can read very subtle clues about your subject’s being. All this might take time…or should.

 

Do your pictures look the way you thought they might? And does that matter? Not a bit. If it is simply the topography of someone’s face, that’s fine for a passport photo, but if your intention was to make a full portrait, what matters is the way that someone who knows nothing about the person might feel when they look at your picture.   Is an intense picture of a person a portrait?

 

If you photograph a person cheering at a game, strongly engaged, and the head fills the frame and their mouth is open and their eyes are wide, is that a good portrait? I think not. It might be lively and energetic, but it falls short of portraiture.

 

Why? My thought is that a portrait (usually) requires a connection that goes both ways, a dynamic and mutual revelation. That connection is passed on to the viewer. It can happen quickly, it can happen without speaking, and there doesn’t need to be eye contact. But there does need to be awareness. It’s a silent agreement, sometimes even a hostile one, that has to happen.

 

The picture at the game? It’s a picture of someone getting excited by a game. It’s lively, energetic, can even be artful, but it’s just not a portrait. The need for that connection, that agreement between you and your subject intensifies things and deepens them. And intense and deep are always good in a portrait.

 

Your next portraits

Again, the best place to start when looking at what you’ve done is with the question, “Is it alive?” It is the thing that a portrait must be. It is possible to learn how to how to provoke expression, dazzle with light, and still avoid the life and authentic humanity in the sitter. People do this all the time and make successful careers of it. Just look around.

 

But if you want to work as an artist you have to look for life and allow it to manifest itself. The life can be inward, the eyes can be closed, they can be looking at you or away, but if the picture is alive, the photographer and subject have engaged and made something together. Look first for life in your portrait. You’ll know it when you see it.

 

Making portraits offers a way to study others and ourselves, and it is a great ongoing practice. I’ve never heard of anyone doing it just once. You will likely do it again and again, just in the course of your photographic exploration. Each time you’ll know more about how the best ones happen. So whatever you have done during this exercise, go out and do it again. And remember to let every portrait be a conversation.