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 The portrait |
Portraits Speaking With The Face
As a photographer for the last twenty years and a student of psychoanalysis for the past five years, I have set out to utilize these new insights in my photographic work. As dissimilar as they may appear, photographic portraiture shares with psychoanalysis an attempt to get beneath the surface. As a photographer, I desire to reveal the expression of the unconscious mind of the human subject presented to my camera. Freud compared psychoanalysis to an archeological dig; portrait photography is a type of dig, looking for what lies beneath the words, underneath the veneer of the public image that we present to the world.
As I conceive and practice it, portrait photography is an active medium, embracing the conscious processes of doing, looking, examining, and taking the picture. Portrait photography examines the unconscious by looking for what is being conveyed symbolically through gestures, movements of the face, selection of the choice of words, choice of the narrative, tone of the speech and silence. The portrait becomes a study of the unconscious communication between myself and the subject supported by their verbal narrative, mannerisms and silence, which often serve as a catalyst for feeling. The silences that I am always listening for are the unspoken words, for whether there is talk or whether there is silence, there are always thoughts. These thoughts become the unconscious expression that move on and off the subject's face as I photograph.
The sessions with my subjects are purposely set up to have fixed boundaries so that as I work, nothing changes except for the shifting relationship between the subject and me, which focuses my process upon the immediate relationship. The subject is instructed to talk about whatever comes to mind. Their face is brightly lit, the room is dim and quiet, and the overall atmosphere is nonstimulating. This provides the subject less information about me, and provides me with more freedom to explore and observe. I neither intervene nor direct but wait for the subject's response to our hour long intimate photographic encounter. I am interested in what is conjured up in the sitter, what the person does, where psychically the person goes, whether the person remains silent, whether they ask me questions, whether they tell me a sad story, or a happy one. With this I become aware of my own feeling state while I photograph. With these two components at work, a merging begins as I intuitively press the shutter at certain moments.
The final images that I choose are portraits that share with the viewer what the subject experienced with me and what I experienced with them. Photography is indeterminate in what it describes, since each viewer that looks at an individual portrait comes away with their own understanding of what that face reveals, reflecting their own history, identity and character. My objective is to highlight an emotionally significant moment in the life of each individual through the act of photographing. The portrait becomes a tapestry of human encounters. |
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