I had set for myself a goal to experiment more with portraiture and street photography as 2020 dawned. That was one of my New Year’s resolutions. 2020 had other ideas, unfortunately.
I’m just one person in the long lineage of people to discover that the best and most interesting visual subject might be other human beings. I think perhaps I’m not the only one to find that it’s incredibly hard to ask other people to allow you to take pictures of them or paint them.
Of all the things that being a self-taught photographer denies you, experience with shooting pictures of other people is the number one absence. If you’re really doing a portrait, there’s so much involved. You need to set up lights. You need to think about backgrounds. You need to understand the person you’re looking at—not just how they look and how light catches on them but what you are seeing and what you can ask of them. I really ought to take a class if I want to get better at this. Even another live drawing class would help, I think.
I find it so hard to think about what I am seeing and harder still to imagine as situation where I could feel comfortable asking a person to stand this way or that way, do this thing or that. It seems to me that the best portraits are either a product of a studio that has some material culture for self-fashioning that invites a person to decide for themselves what they want to be or look like or they are the product of an imperious artistic temperament that pushes the pictured to accept a vision the photographer or painter has. Maybe there’s a practice in between that’s dialogic but I don’t have the knack—or I’m scared of trying.
In such a situation there’s the alternative: yourself. Technically this is frustrating. You have to set up lights and focus laboriously. It can be very tough to decide if you got the shot you had in mind by looking at the camera feed. You can’t tell the model to look this way or that before hitting the shot button—you have to guess for yourself, since you’re not looking in the viewfinder.
The one thing I feel is that if I get a shot that has some technical integrity, I’m bound to it. I could hardly fantasize about photographing other faces if I’m dishonest with my own. The Instagram aesthetic—manipulation up the wazoo—is what it is for people who need to seem fabulous and connected. I’m past that. This is an honest picture of what it is: an aging gloomy-feeling man with long-uncut hair in the middle of a pandemic who had just gotten his first vaccination dose and was trying to use it like the kiss of Prince Charming, trying to wake up from a long sleep.
It’s not my favorite shot of myself in recent years, but there’s something in it that I don’t hate in the sense that it feels visually honest and real. All the portraiture by talented photographers that I like is connected primarily by its honesty. Plus it actually has my eyes, nose and mouth in the right focal plane, which in technical terms for a self-portrait using a low f-stop on a fast lens is a big win.