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March 09, 2007
Portraits
In honor of portrait week over at Alec Soth's great blog I've added a new page to my Portrait Gallery over at Square America. Soth is one of my favorite photographers and his blog is a must read for anyone interested in contemporary photography (or contemporary art for that matter). This week Soth has been posting on portraits- this post is particularly interesting, bringing up issues such as the power relationship between the photographer and the subject. This issue really hits home for me as a snapshot collector- Unlike in art photography where, as Soth notes, "more often than not the photographer holds all of the cards," in snapshots the power relationship is rarely so cut and dried. In snapshots the subject often has as much say (or more) in how they're posed, where and when they're photographed, as well as what photographs are kept or thrown away as the photographer does.
Is this photo a self-portrait or a candid picture taken by a lover?
Of course in the photobooth, (the source of some of the best portrait photography you'll ever see in my opinion) the photographer isn't present at all.
The inability to pin down exactly where the aesthetic charge is coming from (or indeed if there is any real "aesthetic" at work at all) is both disorienting and liberating.
While the realtionship between snapshots and the street photography of the 60's is pretty well established I think that amateur photography's influence is just as apparent in the portraiture of the last 30 years or so. More and more I feel that this is the stuff I really want to collect rather than double exposures or "mistake" shots (for that stuff check out my show What the Camera Saw).
These next few photos are from a bunch of prison polaroids I've gotten recently.
And finally, here are a few more of the new photos I added- in these you have subjects who either didn't want to be photographed or in the case of the sleeper no knowledge of being photographed.
Posted by nick at March 9, 2007 01:59 AM