6 The Art of the Portrait: Get to Know Your Subject
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Great portraiture distinguishes itself by distilling the essence of the subject’s complex personality into a single photo. It is the sole responsibility of the photographer to conduct that distillation process. To do so, the photographer must pull the personality from the model and ensure that it’s exhibited in the model’s face, body, and attitude. One way to do this, of course, is to talk. Talk with your subject while preparing a shot. Ask questions about the person’s life, occupation, hobbies, passions, preferences, family, etc. Learn about the person and then tell their story through the photograph. Go on discussing while you arrange the light, while you put in your film and, finally, while you shoot. Photographing another person is an inti-mate act and can be frightening for the subject… and maybe even for you, as a beginning photographer. The best way to conquer that fear together is to build a true personal relation-ship in this brief time you will spend with each other. Meeting many new and interesting people is one of the greatest pleasures of being a photographer, and so you must develop a brand of charisma or, at the very least, an appropriate bedside manner; in other words, you need to hone your interpersonal skills in order to quickly build trust with your subjects. One thing to keep in mind is that you, as the story-teller, should do more listening than talking. Don't lecture; have a dialogue that’s more heavily weighted to-wards your subject. Ask questions, and show genuine inter-est through attentive listening and responding to your subject’s answers. Sebastião Salgado said it like this: “The picture is not made by the photographer. The picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.”
When shooting this incredibly camera-shy Swiss mountain man, this is the very last picture of the three rolls of film shot. In my brave attempt to uphold a conversation during the entire session, I often found myself coming up short. It was only when we walked back together toward the house (away from the original setting of the picture) that our relationship turned casual, and the man let his guard down. He turned to me to answer a question, and that is the moment of this picture.
Children are often more natural and less camera-shy but, essentially, the same rules apply across the board when it comes to building that photographer-model relationship: show your interest. Be honest. Treat everyone with respect. Taking a picture is something intimate. If you use a wide-angle lens, you get very physically close to your subject, oftentimes trespassing in their “bubble,” so to speak. People will only allow you to trespass if they trust you.
For standard portraits in the studio, the best lens is usually 85 mm to 105 mm. But as mentioned earlier, photojournalism is not about superficial beauty, but about emotions and story-telling, which holds a beauty of its own. A wide-angle is better suited for this task. All portraits in this chapter have been shot with a 50 mm lens or lower.