![]() ![]() Then in 2007, I chanced upon an assignment of photographing Catholic nuns. The body of work teaches us that character is in facial gesture. Again and again, the vast collection of portraiture has been a focus on how the face, especially the eyes, tells the story. Steve McCurry with his veiled Afghan girl, Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange with their poetic Dust Bowl portraits, the Brazilian Sebastiao Salgado and his textured stories of laborers, and most recently, Andrzej Dragan whose portraits are eerie manipulations in digital format. ![]() Studying portraiture, I paid close attention to the people whose portraits told stories eloquently. The eyes allow us to make a connection the face is a canvas of emotion. In portraiture, photographers traditionally have let the eyes do the talking, and set the rest of the face the task of elaboration. Photo by Praveen Gupta on UnsplashĮvery portrait photographer knows the common wisdom that to make a portrait work, the subject's eyes have to be sharp. ![]() He elevated portraiture into what Jean Noel Jenneney in his book called “something rescued in the nick of time, before a whole world vanishes for ever.” Cartier-Bresson taught us that to capture a portrait, we must wait for the moment when everything falls into place, and then we click. It meant that photographers no longer posed and set the stage for their portraits, but suddenly portraits became more of a found art you captured a moment when time and action come to a beautiful conclusion.Ĭartier-Bresson was a hunter for the found portrait. He relegated its usefulness and function in society as a mere record keeping tool and cautioned against photography being an imaginative tool, a tool for artistic expression.īut in the 1920s with the arrival of Cartier-Bresson on the scene, snapshot photography was born. Baudelaire talked about photography as documentation and nothing more. ” When he said this, Charles Baudelaire was talking about how photography seems to be a way to copy nature and present it as an archive of how we live. “Photographers, you will never become artists. ![]()
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