Thinking About Photography

Portraiture is probably our most familiar experience with photography - open any family album and that's 90% of what you'll be looking at. The photo above is one of my favorite images of my mother. When I asked her about it she said, "I was pretty young, 18 or 19, and I don't remember who took it. I seem preoccupied, as if not realizing someone is taking my picture. In those days cameras were pretty big, so conspicuous... it's a mystery." For me, it captures her sense of adventure and engagement with the world and I'm so grateful to have a window into a time before I was born. This past year was so intense that I decided to start the new year with a showcase that grounds us back into how photography preserves our shared humanity and history. 

I see portraiture as a statement - a momentary slice of existence - visualized by the photographer. Because of that, each portrait is also about the photographer: how they see the subject - what speaks to them about it. Finally, it’s interpreted by the audience as they bring all their preconceived ideas about the subject into play. So while a portrait has a structure - it’s often built on the shifting sands of impressions and beliefs. 

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Portraiture is usually part of any “Intro to Photography” class. There’s the self-portrait (and if you went to school in the 60s-80s, its partner-in-crime, the nude self portrait), which gives the photographer a chance to say, "I'm here, I exist!" An artist who really expanded my ideas about the body through the use of the nude self-portrait is Laura Aguilar, who in the late 1990s and early 2000s created evocative images of her body in the landscape. They were brave, serene, and shocking only because we hadn’t seen larger body types in these settings before. My favorite is Nature Self-Portrait #1, taken in 1996 - there’s such a visceral contrast between her soft flesh and the hard rock formation she’s lying on.