Portraying the Portraitist
What do you do when you have to take the portrait of a person?
Some photographers just flow with the moment expecting that the right gesture will come up as a sort of magic, the unexpected moment, no poses just the flow of life. Some others, specially commercial photographers, will focus on key personality traits of the subject and will try to translate those into a visual pose, an emotional gesture, guided by a predetermined plan. Either approach can work and either approach can fail, and most times the best results emerge by having a plan with specific intents and then letting the plan falling apart so to enable the spark of live at the moment to be captured in the photograph.
What about taking a portrait of the most successful portraitist photographer of the times, Annie Leibovitz?
This was the challenge for John Keatley a young photographer located in Seattle, and this was his response [via featureshoot]
Annie was very kind, and open to having some fun with the shoot. But I sensed that she was a little uncomfortable being photographed, and she moved around quite a bit. It would have been difficult to hold her in a pose for very long, so I decided to keep things moving. It was very much an improvised collaboration between Annie and I. She suggested some ideas, and tried various poses. And when I saw something I liked, or thought of something different, I was very specific about guiding her and posing her in a certain way.
‘One of the things that I found out during my research is that Annie looks through her camera with her left eye. That was interesting to me, and I thought about photographing her as if she were looking through a camera. My original thought was to have her closing one eye, but when I explained this to her, she started using her hands around her face. I really liked how this looked, and told her that I wanted to continue with that idea. That pose ended up being the one that I connected with the most.
John describes more details on the shot at his blog:
When Annie came into the room, she looked around at the lighting setup, and said, “Wow, this looks scary.” My thoughts exactly, but it wasn’t the lights I was thinking about. We talked a few minutes about photography and cameras before she sat down. Then I told her about my idea for the portrait, and asked if she would mind taking off her glasses. She said that was fine, and I started to shoot. It was a balancing act trying to find the line between being in control to get what I wanted, and not being pushy. I could tell that she was not comfortable being photographed. She moved around a lot while I shot, and I decided to be flexible rather than push too much to hold a certain pose. Things don’t always go exactly to plan, and sometimes this can be a pleasant surprise. It felt like the shoot ended up being a collaboration in making the pictures. It’s not often that I work with someone who is so willing to be expressive and experiment as she was. Shortly after we started, the shoot came to an end, and I knew that I had the shot. I thanked her for her time, and she said, “You did good.” I’ll take it! What a compliment.
Don””t miss the chance to browse his website and peruse the very nice portraits in there.
[...] interview has also led to a couple of other blog articles today. (here) Lost At E Minor (here) [EV +/-] Exposure Compensation Author: John | Filed under: My Press | Tags: John Keatley [...]
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