Anyone can make a snapshot of another person. Point, click, done. However, could you call it a portrait? Would you call it a portrait? Without insight and understanding, an image of a person is a shot in the dark – random information on celluloid or CCD that may happen to resemble the physical visage of a particular person.
A good portrait depends on a lot of things. A lot of time is spent debating lens choice, film choice, lighting, style, and so on. Granted, yes, these are all reasonably important things to consider. However, the most important thing in the equation has absolutely nothing to do with the technical side of photography. The thing of greatest importance here is insight. It is knowing your subject. It is being aware of your relationship with your subject. It is looking at a part of your subject other than his or her physical form.
An image of a person without insight into that person is shallow, without anything greater than face value. Factor in an understanding of the person, however – even if it’s only minimal – and suddenly you’ve added a whole different dimension of human experience to the image. A picture is of a person – a portrait is about a person.
I want to make honest, meaningful portraits of all of my friends and as many people beyond that as I can. In a world full of shitty Wal*Mart snapshots, I want to make images that are deliberately labor intensive, images that are an investment of time and self by subject and photographer, images that will tell you just as much about a person two hundred years from now as they do today.
