Evolution of a Portrait

What makes a great portrait?

Technical mastery of every single button on your DSLR? An amazing instinct for capturing strangers in a park? I’ve been shooting for 10 years, I’ve shot countless portraits of professional models, amateur models, nude, clothed, friends, family, people on the street, etc – and I can honestly say that I have trouble answering that question. I know what I like when I look at portraits and I know what I don’t like. When I first started out I was really into creating edgy, controversial images that were very contrived and staged. As evidenced by this blast from the past, shot in my college photo classes circa 2006 – 2008. Not a bad photo but it definitely feels like it was shot by a college student caught up in his angsty “artistic vision.” As I progressed in my education I realized that fabricating a story just wasn’t for me and it clearly wasn’t my strong suit.

Fast forward several years to my early work on the Diversity project. I wanted to produce a body of work that combated the culture of body shaming by celebrating the beauty of the nude form in every size and shape it comes in.

By photographing the models on a plain white backdrop with little to no makeup, hair styling, or elaborate poses I completely removed any aspect of a preconceived story from the scene.

Yet what I came to realize as I worked with some truly amazing people, is that when I removed a lot of the formal direction from the project and allowed the models to truly be themselves I ended up telling much truer stories than anything I could have contrived in my college years. Diversity helped me remember what I always instinctively loved about portrait photography – whether you’re looking at Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, or Humans of New York – it’s the stories that truly capture you. So as I began to wind down the Diversity project I started looking for other stories to tell. Realizing that the stories are already there, I didn’t need to create them, was an important step in the evolution of my work.

In early 2017 I attended two workshops at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops in New Mexico. At the time I was in the middle of some serious struggles in my personal life, coming to terms with my own anxiety and mental illness after 30 years of repressing it and dealing with the consequences of that and its impacts on my loved ones. The workshops helped me refocus on the art that I was truly passionate about. Even while I was photographing the Diversity series I did not consider myself a full time photographer – that was something I wanted to change.

The first workshop, Classic Portraiture with Kurt Markus and Norman Mauskopf helped me hone all the important technical aspects of shooting environmental portraits and fueled my passion while working under two amazing portrait photographers. The second, Photographic Obsession taught by Jason Langer, motivated me to find my artistic direction again. I struggled for the first few days of Jason’s workshop, I couldn’t find a theme that I connected with and I was frustrated with my lack of vision. Finally, as he pushed me to look deeper into the theme of obsession the seeds of my new project began to take root.

As I dealt with my newfound emotional issues, the one comfort I had was the understanding that mental illness is not isolated. It is everywhere, everyday people are almost always struggling with their own issues oftentimes beneath the surface. I wanted to offer that comfort to others, to let people know that they aren’t alone in their battles. So I placed ads on Craigslist, looking for anyone suffering from depression, trauma, abuse, etc willing to come forward and have their portraits taken. The response was surprisingly quick and encouraging. I photographed several people during the last few days of the workshop, all of whom were surprisingly eager to share their stories. The struggling artistic 20 something couple, the heroin addicted single mother of two, the abuse survivor slowly putting her life back together.

The photos I took were possibly some of the best photographs I’ve taken to date, shot in simple black and white usually in the subject’s home. I’ve continued the project since then, working on it slowly in the background while I continue to build the rest of my career – it is the project that is currently closest to my heart because it tells my story too. I’ve included two samples here for the sake of this post and more will follow as I allow the project to grow and mature on its own.

So at the end of the day I will amend my earlier statement. I do know what makes a good portrait: a story. Whether it’s a story you have the ability to create out of thin air or you choose to document the story that’s already inside the subject waiting to come out. My own work has evolved by leaps and bounds this past year as I’ve learned to connect with my subjects, to listen to their stories and retell them in my own way. If a portrait doesn’t tell a story it might as well be in the head shot pages of a high school year book.