PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS AND PRESENCE

….a way to capture souls…

My book, TRANSIENT LIGHT, FLEETING TIME is now available in hardback.
As always when one’s work gains responses,
it offers new attitudes and ideas to the author.
At the same time, for various reasons, I have been thinking about portraits.

As a photographer it is vital to educate your visual awareness.
I have continually done this by looking at all sorts of pictures
and in particular, at the western history of painting.

Someone saw two of my documentary images, which are often portraits.
She said that although they were on a page with other’s images,
my two images grabbed her attention.
When I asked why, she replied that “they have a greater PRESENCE,
the same kind of a presence some people have when they enter a room,
or a fine actor has on stage or screen”.

What does the PRESENCE come from?
In the first case it exists in the person pictured.
The individual has a density of being, and a connection to their souls.
There is seriousness and gravity which pulls one towards the person.
You can tell it straight away.

This isn’t about entitlement; those who carry that burden are often superficial,
relying on wealth, power or illusions of themselves,
none of which have emotional or intellectual density,
that PRESENCE of a poet or a surgeon.

Those entitled are trapped in a miasma of illusions about the values of life,
trapped by a useless belief in materialism and their relationship to it.
The do make for savage portraits.

The Italian Renaissance painter Piero Della Francesca (1415 – 1492)
understood the problem of placing his subjects in the picture plain.
Unlike those earlier than he, in the great humanist voyage of the Renaissance,
he took a profound step away from the flat space of earlier Gothic frescos,
placing his subjects in a knowable, realistic space
which the viewer could feel was recognizable and safe.

But, as you can see in his above painting of the Virgin and Child,
the viewer sees immobility.
The always kinetic world was reduced to a rigidified impassivity
which one may think of as a kind of serenity, but it lacks realism.
With his flattening of space and ordering of the architectural and natural world,
his work reflected the newly arising middle-class need for a static, rigid world,
which was understood to be better for business and profits.
This relationship between the evolving painterly style
and evolving middleclass wealth and power
reveals how art is a product of the financial as well as political, scientific and ideological state of things at any point in history.

The present guardians at the gates of our cultural institutions
are the enforcers of today’s newly risen ultra-wealthy who,
through their ownership of the electronic and print media, the arts and popular culture,
influence what is allowed to be accessible.

But after Piero, along came Leonardo DaVinci (1452 – 1519) who understood that
“not only the placement of the character in the picture’s space was important
but that movement as the foundation of life, and more,
it is also an instrument for the expression of emotions”.
With this conception of how humans express their inner being,
Leonardo could reveal hesitation, adulation, awe, worry, etc.
The expressive movements he painted linked the outer description of his character
to their inner psychology.

Look at his painting above.
The realistic interplay of the characters is filled with so many emotions:
a quiet joy, introspection, pleasure, security, playfulness, love and warmth
much of which is expressed by the physical movement of the characters
as well as the mobile faces that express more than the rigid Mary of Piero’s painting.

This was a huge step for western society.
For the first time in history,
the distinct inner being of individuals was not only understood to exist
and to have importance,
but it was also a step away from the dark mysteries of the church
and its insistence that humans were mere reflections of God’s will.
Leonardo understood that each of us are composed of something distinctly individual.
He is important because he helped us to define our unique humanity
with its worries, agonies and pain.

In Leonardo’s paintings of the Virgin Mother with the Christ child,
he disregarded the then recent style of picturing her as an austere aristocrat
concerned with and only concentrating on the child,
as in the Piero’s painting above.
Rather, his close attention to the waves of emotions
that could be passing through the (poor) young woman’s mind,
had him render conflicting emotions,
both enjoying motherhood and being concerned about the surrounding adulation.

This returns to the idea of PRESENCE.
When I photograph people, it is because I am intrigued by who and what they are.
Their presentation (clothing, how they sit and hold themselves,
where they look and what affections they may project)
and the shadows behind their eyes reveal the complexity of individual’s personalities.
I have never seen people as being a specimen,
but rather as living representatives of their society,
its belief system and their position in it.
But also, how their values and conscious and unconscious moral codes
play a part in who they are and how they react to me.
In this searching for the moment,
I release the shutter that captures their PRESENCES,
their sense of being.

That is, I try to uncover their individual humanity.
This is why for me, photographing a portrait
is not that different than photographing in uncontrolled situations,
in that I will not release the shutter randomly,
but when I think something is about to be revealed.
This is about using the concept of the Decisive Moment
while rejecting generalizations.
The decisive moment is when the subject matter expresses the essence of meaning
while at the same time the picture’s composition supports the idea of the picture. 

The dockers in the vertical image above,
whom I was sitting across from in the Hull dockers canteen,
looked down at my camera on the table and back up at my eyes.
I thought I understood,
put down my mug of steaming tea,
picked up the camera and slowly brought it to my eye,
giving him a chance to stop me.
He didn’t.
I shot one frame and put the camera back on the table.
I thanked him,
thinking I wanted to ask his name and would he like a copy.
But he stood up, turned his back and walked away.
This simple gesture of the foreigner (that American) had honoured him.

The horizontal image is of the conductor, composer Graham Treacher,
a dear friend.
Whilst making a film about him,
I put the video camera down and took this still.
It is a fine artist at work, concentrating, paying no attention to me or my cameras.
I had become invisible so that my PRESENCE would be unnoticed.