Portraits

In some cases the setting is an essential part of the image—perhaps the essential element. The example below, from Joel Sternfeld's book, Stranger Passing, depends (in part) on considerable depth-of-field. The dark tones of the hills certainly are not distracting, the older white auto may be his abode and neither leads our eyes away from any critical aspect of the photo. The dramatic clouds provide credence to the authenticity of his wind-blown beard, which is quite reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton's painting of John Brown, or of an Old Testament prophet. Notice especially how the man's head is positioned above the crestline of the distant hills—it sometimes appears to us that it's floating there, opr perhaps more connected to the hills than to his body. What an idea! Because of his full hair, his head looks disproportionately large for his body.
     We can't see the features of his face very well, but the total scene offers a convincing (although not necessarily complete) impression of who he is. We think this is an exceptional image.

Now contrast that with this image from Walker Evans' work for the FSA in the Depression. He posed the wife of a sharecropper against the unpainted siding of her house and moved in very tight. Like the fellow in the image above, she is looking directly into the camera. There are not many clues in the photograph to tell us much about her, but we might reasonably infer she is not a movie star or a debutante. A close examination yields even more information; although she appears to be in her 30s, the lines in her forehead and her tightly-pursed mouth suggest she's aged more than most women her age. Her hair has simply been parted and pulled back. Evidence we might say of some interest in how she looks but without any interest or ability to make herself stylish. Even the open collar of her dress carries information from which we may construct something of her life. We see in her eyes both a wry amusement that she is the subject of this well-educated polished New York photographer, and a certain wariness—but that's what we bring to the photo, not something that is obvious or self-evident to all.
      In fact, this was one of a series of images of Allie Mae Burroughs and her family in the book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which provides all the context we need to know who she is and what kind of life she leads. But the image can stand alone without that context, of course. In many ways, there is no less information in this spare image than in the rich context provided by Sternfeld's portrait.

One purpose of looking closely at two very different images is to show how much can be communicated (or evoked in an alert viewer) by the "incidentals" in an image—the background, small details, and other things we might not notice on a cursory examination. Even the fact that the weathered siding is not perfectly horizontal is intriguing, and perhaps suggestive to you, as it is to us. Evans was using a large view camera on a tripod and he could have squared things up if he wanted to. The strength of this portrait is clearly not just in the subject's eyes and expression.

And notice that we have not even raised the issue of whether the portraits are a good likeness of the subjects, for that is simply irrelevant.

Go to ACTIVITIES

No. 3 September 2006

Photography is not simply a craft
  or art, but a means of seeing and thinking about our world.