Narrative assignment

My idea for the narrative is this: After death, some spirits don't realize they're no longer part of the living world. They continue to go about their dayss as they always did; walking to the grocery store, sitting on a bench next to their loved ones, or looking out a window. Every now and then, a photographer unwittingly captures these apparitions, invisible to the human eye, on their camera. Here is a collection of these "accidental" spirit photography:

So, without further ado, please click on this link:

------> The Secret Lives of Apparitions <--------

My narrative research slideshow is here: http://picasaweb.google.com/jessicapetunia/NarrativeResearchPhotos#

Environmental Portraits

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Environmental Portrait research

In order to be successful an environmental portrait should convey something about both the subject and his or her surroundings. While the background may contribute to an understanding of the subject's personality, or vice-versa, what's most important in this type of photography as opposed to landscape or straight-up portraiture, is that relationship between the space and the person. If the environmental portrait can be executed with proper light exposure and clever composition, well all the better.

I'll start with the bad to get it out of the way. All of these images are self-described "environmental portraits," even though for the majority the issue I have is that there isn't enough environment for them to technically qualify. And then of course there are the usual infractions of heavy-handed Photoshoppery and over-the-top props. In any case, these are best viewed on an empty stomach:

The ugly

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As for excellent environmental portraits, I found myself drawn very strongly to the work of famous photographers like Lewis Hine, Mary Ellen Mark and Tina Barney. Each has a representative photo in my album. But I have to say that hands down my favorite environmental portraitist is a relatively unknown chap from my hometown of Detroit named MARK ALOR POWELL. (I know I've mentioned him before on my blog last year but I revisited his work in the context of this project and his portraits definitely deserve mentioning again...he's that good.)

His website and flickr are full to the brim with great stuff so the tricky part for me was narrowing it down to just a few amazing portraits.

What I find so successful about his style is that he captures real people, and there is very little pretense about the shot; that neither the subject nor the background have been tampered with and that you feel you are witnessing a real moment. In this way you get the sense that you really are getting acquainted with the subject of the portrait; who is often times a subject you wouldn't normally come across in your daily life. I love the fearlessness Powell seems to exhibit in approaching everyday people to take their photos, and not trying to assert a pose or a feeling to the photo, but just letting the innate personality of his subject take center stage. He allows the natural dignity that every person is imbued with to shine through, and I think it takes a rare photographer to put his or her subject so at ease that this phenomenon occurs time and again. It's probably easy to get lucky with one or two decent portraits but judging by how prolific Powell is, you know he's the real deal.

so without further ado, here are a few of my favorite environmental portraits:

the VERY good

...and two more for the road.

more bellocq emulation

Portrait Emulation project (Part I)

Here are the first pictures in the series. I have a roll of film being developed that has the rest on it. To be continued...

Notes on Eugene J. Bellocq

"A woman lies on an ironing board set up behind her house, dressed in a loose shirt, knickers and dark stockings, kicking her heels while playing with her miniature dog. Two women sit on a rug, sharing a bottle of wine and playing cards. A pretty woman sits in her window, nude and relaxed, smiling at the camera. A woman sits quietly in a plain wooden chair against a rumpled, makeshift backdrop, her smock off her shoulders, her hands tucked protectively under her arms, looking thoughtfully off to one side.

The surroundings in the photos are generally meager, even dismal -- plain rooms with flowered wallpapers, sometimes minimally decorated with college pennants or small mementos. The quality of photographic plates reinforces the mood. Many are scratched, peeling, stained or broken. Some have sections that are missing entirely. In most of the nude photographs the womens' faces have been crudely, almost violently scratched away entirely [...] perhaps by Bellocq himself, perhaps to protect their identities. And yet there is a basic kind of grounded sensuality that the women in these photographs convey, quite different from the affectedly mirthful conventions of the classic pinup or the coy French postcard. It is the sensuality of women at ease with themselves and with the sexuality of their bodies, an ease that was hardly typical of women of their time."

(source: http://storyvilledistrict.tripod.com/bellocq_women.html)




http://www.photography-now.net/listings/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=438&Itemid=334




Techniques:
available light,
often set at the subject's own home or place of work,
pets, rugs, pictures on the wall,
or outdoors with a makeshift backdrop
using a view camera or other large format, rectangular
portrait orientation
damaged plates
if nudity, then face covered or photograph deliberately damaged to conceal identity
if no nudity, then best clothes or underclothes, black stockings, hair up





On Prostitution:

Finally, while the photographer was otherwise engaged, my friend, a shy poet, and I hired a beautiful young Brazilian woman to take us to a room. She stripped to her G-string while we sipped champagne and I questioned her about her life history. She kept asking us what we wanted her to do. I asked if I could take some photographs, and shot a few pictures of the decor of the rooms, and then of her nude and smiling, at ease on the round bed. I wanted these images to come as close as they could to the experience of her having to be intimate with strangers, like putting myself in the position of a john without forcing any sexual transaction. The experience of photographing her served as sublimation for the act of caressing her velvet skin. We each kissed her, paid her, and left. A gallery in Los Angeles recently exhibited a wide variety of photographs of prostitution that included one of these pictures of Linda from Bel Ami. The artists represented ranged from Brassai to Lisette Model to Mary Ellen Mark to Philip-Lorca diCorcia, but on the cover of the invitation, appropriately enough, was an image by E.J. Bellocq, the remarkable early-twentieth-century photographer of the Storyville whorehouses whose pictures are among the most profound and beautiful portraits of prostitutes ever taken.

[...]



[...]

At the turn of the century, prostitution was an even more unusual subject for photography than today, and the experience of being photographed was far different. At that time, it would have been a special occasion, a form of attention that required time and collaboration. In spite of the large, unwieldy 8 x 10 camera, Bellocq's pictures appear natural, and the women seem open and trusting.

Contradicting the effervescence of much of the work, many more of the disturbing photographs in which the women's faces are intentionally scratched out have been included in this new book. While the willful destruction of photographic images of the body in contemporary art has become a kind of artful, self-conscious trend, in Bellocq's case, this bizarre and savage act seems to be some kind of personal censorship. In art school in the '70s, I had been taught that Bellocq's brother, a Jesuit priest, had been the culprit, though that theory seems to be disputed now. Some theorize that Bellocq himself scratched the glass negatives while they were still wet, either out of the desire to protect somone's identity or some emotional outburst or jealousy. I think it's highly unlikely that he would have done this to his own work, so lovingly made, and if he had wanted to hide the identity of some of the women, he could have used masks, as he did in some of the pictures. The theory that one of the girls may have done it out of jealousy or a desire to deny the intimacy she had previously been engaged in seems most likely to me, although it could be called into question by the fact that in a few places pictures of the same girl occur with her face both intact and deleted. In the end, the defaced pictures add a darkness that could represent a visual metaphor for violence against women that is in direct contrast to the warmth and tenderness of the book as a whole.

[...]

The printing in tritone instead of duotone permits much more gradation and subtlety in the print quality. The book is as sensual and seductive as the women in it.

source: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/11/theory-bellocq-epoque-nan-goldin-on.html

Colin Wood

Since we've been discussing Diane Arbus and this iconic photograph, I thought I'd share an excerpt from an interview of the subject, Colin Wood, that BBC's Genius of Photography series did. Although his name might not be familiar to photographers his image most certainly is. This is what Colin Wood looked like for a split second in 1962:




Here's Wood's take on his portait:

"I was absolutely beside myself with energy. I used to eat Junket, which is this pure dessert. I don't know what they made it out of, some like Dow chemical. I think, I think it was about four ingredients away from Napalm. And I used to eat this stuff, like, raw, out of the box, and by the time I was finished with the Napalm or the derivative, I was like walking on the ceiling.

"So along comes this pacific character with really no connection to the inner world of violence, you know, who's wandering around like a cloud with a Hasselblad.

"(showing photo) One of the things I like most about this is these grenades, and I had two of them, and probably the reason I don't have the other one in my hand is because I threw it out the window where we used to live to see if I could blow up the alley.

"From the contact sheet I can see she took about maybe fifteen photos of me, and I was a curiosity for her. And I'm a ham, so in the photos I'm definitely having a pretty fun time, and my feeling about her is that there was this, uh,... I think I liked her because I can see in my face, and definitely here I feel a collaboration, that there would be an encouragement for me to sort of do something a little wacky. She was giving me a little piece of direction. I don't say she suggested I do this, but obviously thematically for her since the other photos don't contain the hand grenade it was important that it be there.

"This is absolutely in many ways capturing an aspect of my life. At the time my mother had just divorced my father, there was a lot of tension at home, I was really very I would say very lonely, but what she was seeking and got which was what her genius is, is the reflection of her own self in many ways, which was very very true, and it was in me."

I once read a quote from another photographer whose identity I can't recall, but it said something like, "portraits tell you more about the photographer than they do about the subject." I think it's interesting to think of Diane Arbus in this context; that she recognized an energy in the people whose pictures she captured, and sought out those qualities in others that she was feeling herself.

Portrait Comparison

Two major players in the history of photographic portraiture are Diane Arbus and Edward Steichen, though their styles could hardly be said to be similar. While both photographers tended to work in black and white and to capture one subject at a time, the commonalities end there.

Arbus takes a completely unflinching view of her subjects. It's as if she is daring us to see the imperfections of the person or to deem them not beautiful.



She seems fascinated to the point of obsession with humanity... warts and all. Her subjects are often everyday joes or the fringes of society; the last people you would think of as apt portrait subjects.



She uses a very harsh light, and frames people head-on; hardly the most flattering portrayal.



Steichen on the other hand often deals with celebrities and people of renown. His camera is much more flattering towards his subjects, practically deifying them.



He uses angles that present the sitter from a magnifying angle.



The lighting in Steichen's portraits is usually very soft, giving his subjects a glow that glosses over any imperfections.




Two portrait photographers that I've come across in my personal photo-lookin' are Benoit Paillé (Benoit P.) and Pieter Hugo. Both photographers are very contemporary in that their portraits are in color, and often highly saturated at that. They both seem most comfortable working in natural light, and their portraits give the sense that they're not set up; the subjects are photographed pretty much where the photographer found them with little intervention on the photographer's part.

Benoit P. is from Quebec, actually, and his approach to portraiture is to choose people from the street; perfect strangers, to pose.



Though his subjects are your average, run-of-the-mill people, Benoit is still able to capture something unique about each one.




He tends to favor a square crop with the subject directly in the center of the photo.




Pieter Hugo is a photographer working from Africa, specifically Nigeria and Liberia. He has several series of which these portraits are taken, notably "Hyenas and Other Men" and "Nollywood."



Though he is working in a completely different geographical location than Benoit P, there is a similarity in the styles of the two photographers. Something about the respect that you feel in the images towards the subject...



Hugo, too, uses natural lighting and a minimum of intervention with the subject, thus presenting the scene just as you feel he must have come across it.




Neither photographer is working with stars or celebrities like Edward Steichen, but nor are they trying to shock or provoke with their choice of subject or lighting in the way that Arbus did. Instead, both contemporary photographers present their average subject with dignity and invite us to recognize the extraordinary in the people we come across in our day-to-day lives. Though we as residents of North America are probably more familiar with the types of people that Paillé photographs, Hugo gives the distinct impression that if we were to travel to his part of the world, it wouldn't be long before we happened upon subjects such as the ones populating his images.