In an effort to honor the annual college break that many of my friends still have, I decided to take my own spring break for the past two weeks. That may be why you have seen very little blogging.

Another reason is that many of these still-in-school friends decided that Maine is a popular spring break destination. I’m not sure how Maine became as popular as Florida among my friends, but I was happy to have the visitors. The conversations that ensued with them will be the stimulus for my blogging over the next few weeks. If there is anything that I miss about being in school it may be the photo/art conversations that can be had at a moments notice.

The first post I would like to make is in honor of last week’s visitor Rick Williamson (he has no website). We discussed at length the expectation of beauty in photography.

Before I get to anything about beauty, here is an anything-but-beautiful (and I think hilarious) photograph of Rick on the cover of RIT’s on campus magazine Reporter. The photo is taken by Tom Schirmacher.

Okay, on to the beautiful stuff…

Rick and I were noticing that nearly every portrait of someone under 40 makes them look beautiful. Perhaps this is simply the beauty of youth, but I don’t think so.

As a young male who looks at an awful lot of photographs, I often notice that I see images of beautiful women before I notice portraits of unattractive women.  I began trying to look for unattractive women in art photography today, and I discovered that it is incredibly difficult to find any of it.  I believe that the same problem exists for finding portraits of unattractive men as well.

I began to discuss the consequences of seeing an overwhelming majority of only attractive people in photographs with Rick.  We came to the general conclusion that we are conditioned to want to see beauty before ugliness. It is as if it is natural to turn our cameras towards beautiful people. Maybe as photographers as a whole we are not as subjective as we would like to be when it come to photographing people.

It is interesting to mention that if we take people out of the frame altogether photographers seem to have no difficulties to point their cameras to some injustice; some “ugly” event or thing. When I mention injustice I am thinking of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of nickel tailings and quarries and the harmed landscape in general. I am not thinking about war or combat photography at all in any part of this discussion on beauty. I am really looking at art photography specifically.

Below is one of Burtynsky’s photographs of nickel tailings titled Nickel Tailing No. 31.

To get back to the beauty in portraits and specifically in the subjects in the portraits. I think of Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits and many of the subjects are awkward and young, but because of the seem exposed to the lens and their youthfulness there is also an attractiveness about them. They are not sexy, but they are attractive standing there in the swimsuits looking at us at a young age. To me this is also similar to Hellen Van Meene’s portraits. Her subjects are young and awkward as well, but they too command attention in the frame with both presence and emotional frailty.

I am curious to better understand why we photograph the people we do. There are many people who only photograph those with whom they are close. There are others who only photograph strangers. What is the criteria for them to make a portrait of their subject? A photographer may not say beauty initially, but I am beginning to believe that for the most part beauty enters into the equation somewhere. It may be an unconscious thought, but I believe that most photographers are drawn to photograph people that are beautiful in some way, even if it is not instantly recognizable.

The other aspect of this that fascinates me a lot is when I see a portrait and my gut reaction is that I don’t like it, and I begin to elaborate why and inevitably the subject’s poor appearance comes up. I found myself saying in a conversation with Rick that I thought the photographer should have looked for different light to make their subject look more attractive. I guess this means it might just be me who thinks that people are always beautiful in successful portraits today because I may be overlooking images because the person does not appear beautiful.

This leads me to one more point, are the best art portraits in photography today made of average looking people that have been photographed in such a unique clever way that they appear more beautiful than they would walking down the street? Is it just that photographers, when looking through the camera, are trying to make things beautiful to the extent that the photograph comes out looking more aesthetically pleasing than the person is normally?

I remember in my photo classes being taught how to do studio portrait lighting, and learning what makes people look better and worse. Because of this education do I just want to make all photographs fit into this mold of what good portraits look like? This all goes back to how we have been conditioned to look at photographs.

Since photographing beauty might come from simply having a camera in front of our eyes and looking at people in such a way that makes them more attractive.  Looking through a camera instead of just our plain eyeballs is a totally different experience, one that can remove you from the actual event of seeing.

That happens to be a perfect segway into this video of an excerpt from This American Life animated by Chris Ware, recently seen at MakingRoom.

“People act different if they are behind a camera, even if the camera isn’t real.”
“Yeah, you’re overtaken, you do things that you ordinarily wouldn’t.”

I’m pretty sure that all of this dealing with looking through cameras and beauty is related.

p.s. a recent This American Lifeepisode about testosterone is really interesting, I recommend listening to it at thislife.org.

p.p.s. Happy Birthday Sean, and Rock Chalk Jayhawk!
(Last year for spring break we saw this, and it was beautiful).

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Aesthetics, Beauty, By Ethan, Our Team, Photographers, Portraits, Posts with pictures, Posts with video, Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.