When being asked about Dutch portraiture, most people will probably think of photographers like Rineke Dijkstra or Hellen van Meene. Less well known are artists like, for example, Anouk Kruithof (see her Becoming Blue) or Melanie Bonajo, who combine portraiture with a heavily conceptual approach. If you look at Viviane Sassen’s portraiture, you’ll find such a conceptual approach (or at least training), with fashion thrown into the mix. Her work is now on view at Danziger Projects (until April 10, 2010; click on the image above to see a larger version). (more)
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Regular readers of this blog I’m sure will be familiar with Lydia Panas’ work (if not, find my conversation with Lydia here). The Mark of Abel work is now on view at Foley Gallery (until April 20, 2010; click on the image above for a larger view).
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Since so many people seemed to enjoy the scans from Franz Fiedler’s 1934 guide Portrait Photography, here are some more scans. This time descreened scans, and no snarky comments.
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People sometimes ask how master photographers take portraits, and when you ask them they often do such a lousy job explaining how it works. Thankfully, there is Franz Fiedler’s Portrait Photography (1934, I just bought the English language version, published in 1936) that tells you how it all works. Here are some excerpts.
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The portraiture of Amy Adams and Louise te Poele could not be any more different. Both were contestants at this year’s Hyeres Fashion and Photography Festival, presenting their work to the jury - and the visitors.
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When Fraction Magazine asked me whether I wanted to put a show together for their site, I agreed, and it didn’t take long for me to come up with something. It took me a little bit longer to decide about not using my original idea and, instead, to do something entirely different. Something maybe a bit surprising, especially in the light of the kind of photography you typically see here. My show, just unveiled, is called The Unknown Portraitist, and it features tintype portraiture from my own collection, taken by unknown photographers.
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I recently came across of contemporary practitioners of tintype (ferrotype) photography: Robert Benson (via Feature Shoot) and Robb Kendrick (via Exposure Compensation).
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Check out Martin Schoeller and Steve Pyke talking about some of their portraits.
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For me, Hellen van Meene’s portraits of adolescents are exceptional. There’s a very nice interview/feature with/of her here - also not to be missed by people who are interested in the relationship between a portrait photographer and her subject.
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Editorial portraiture isn’t portraiture in the simplest sense (with a photographer, a subject, and a viewer). Instead, if contains an additional component: The person who commissions the portrait, who has the intended meaning/use in his/her head before the portrait is even taken, and who thus deprives the viewer of the true experience of a portrait. So we see this portrait in a story about an author writing about her tough life in gangs and this portrait of the same author after it all was revealed as a fabrication (I found this on subjectify). So the New York Times did not commission a portrait, they commissioned photographic illustrations. (to be continued…) Earlier parts: one, two
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“Photoshop,” was my immediate response, followed by “I wonder what crap Hollywood movie this is from”, when I saw this photo (note this is quite a disturbing photograph!). And then I read the caption, and it turns out it’s a real photo, it’s a real person: “A French woman badly disfigured by facial tumours caused by a rare and incurable disease has appealed to President Nicolas Sarkozy to allow her to die by euthanasia. In an interview with the Agence France-Presse news agency, former school teacher Chantal Sebire, 52, begged for the right to end the ‘atrocious’ suffering inflicted on her by the disease which has rendered her face unrecognisable because of growing tumours.” (story)
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People often tell me that Thomas Ruff’s portraits are boring. What does that mean: “boring”? How can a portrait be boring?
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Robert Wright wrote a two-part piece on The Sartorialist and his current show (part 1, part 2). I haven’t seen the show, yet (so I obviously can’t say anything about it), and I haven’t been following his blog, either (it looks like a street version of Go Fug Yourself, with models and commentary provided by the general public). But it seems to me that maybe a good way to exhibit his work would be to show the photos along with some of the comments. It almost appears as if the photos are somewhat incomplete without the comments - and then the whole package somehow says something about our current times. Or maybe not. Probably best to leave it up to the theorists to decide and elaborate on that.
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About the What makes a great portrait? post, I found this following comment (can you guess what very popular photo site this is from?): “Some good observations, but the sheer length of the post and diversity of the responses seems to argue that there can be no consensus on this question.” Anyway, here is something about “what’s it like to photograph somebody famous”, with three one great portraits and both sides of the story.
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When discussing what “makes” a great portrait with Exposure Compensation’s Miguel Garcia-Guzman, we quickly realized that we couldn’t really agree on much. So we figured we might as well ask some other people, and we sent out an email to a large number of photographers, fine art and commercial, bloggers, curators, editors, and gallerists: “What makes a good portrait? Could you provide us an example of a portrait that you really like - either from your or someone else’s work - and say why the portrait works so well for you?” to publish what we would get back on our blogs, as a collaborative effort to get a little bit closer to understanding the topic. Below is what we got back from those who managed to find the time to write something. Our thanks to everybody who contributed!
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