Aren’t I just taking portraits of myself rather than anyone else?

Or less pessimistically, are the portraits I’m taking portraits of our relationship rather than a portrait of Kris or Laura?

Or does this only stay as an illusion for myself or at best in the process of making, does it ever actually show in the image? How much can a portrait describe anyway?

Don’t I have to develop the most intimate relationships with the people I take portraits of to have any sort of chance at making something that’s worth creating?

How or am I using portraiture as a tool to brutally analyse my relationships with people?

When made transparent to either Laura or Kris, how can this honest analysis of our relationship change it?

But I’m still hiding a lot, also from myself, so how can I start to bring that out into the open?

And by virtue of doing so develop my own honest method for portraiture?

Can I even perceive either of them as just themselves rather than the character they play in my own life/story/whatever?

How can I stay objective in the midst of irrational and emotional impulses towards Kris and Laura? How can I be close and not totally clouded by my own primitive desires? Or is that something to embrace and not avoid?

In what way would these approaches change our relationship?

Where in all of this am I a photographer? Or does that even matter? Can a photographer just be a friend with a camera?

A paradox of vulnerability.

The photographer, the sitter, the audience and portraiture.

What happens when you fall in love with your sitter? What happens when photographers follow their primitive desires instead of committing them- selves to diligent and disciplined mastery of their practice? What happens
to the understanding of a persons character and personality once the photographer becomes totally overwhelmed with his own emotions and desires towards his sitter? I recently got myself into such a situation and it completely changed my understanding of the role I take as a portrait maker.

I thought that I could use portraiture as a way to understand the complexity of a persons personality and character. I thought that the more I photo- graphed a person the more their personality would start to reveal themselves, the more layered their character would become. I thought that by developing a relationship with someone the more the photography would start to reflect the true nature of their character. I thought that if I start to understand the persons vulnerabilities I could start to describe their character with photography in a precise and particular way, however it is exactly the reveal of vulnerability that handicapped my ability to understand her. See, we often think that photography as a medium itself is an objective documentation of the material in front of the lens, but that’s not true. When a photographer figures out when to clack the shutter just at precisely the moment when the sitter loses her mask, that small moment of vulnerability that maybe would otherwise have never been detected will be saved in time and its existence magnified tenfold. Now that her vulnerability is there for me to see and touch at my whim this sudden access to her becomes addictive and manipulative

of my own perception of her. It’s somewhat perverse, being a photographer. Always having access to someones vulnerability, never having to be confront- ed by them over the obsession of that vulnerability. I thought I was observing, studying, trying to understand her, but here I am falling in love with her because of my own portraits. It’s that what recording someone’s vulnerability makes you do, fall in love.

However isn’t falling in love the allure of much of contemporary photography? Images always try to make us relate to someone or feel more com- passionate towards them, all more subtle ways of describing falling in love. Portraiture is particularly susceptible to this, especially when the “taste” of the viewer and the person on the portrait start to align even the slightest. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, perhaps just the right gender and a preferable tone of the photograph itself is enough. As an example of portraiture that I believe does this lets take the picture of Saffron Aldridge by Nadav Kander. What do you see? A black & white photograph of a woman, a headshot, there’s an appearance of movement although it’s not clear whether it’s the camera or the person. She appears to be wearing light amounts of makeup, she’s blond, there’s a dark and sizeable shadow under her jaw and nose. Her skin appears to be perfectly smooth, her teeth perfectly straight. There’s a reflection of the flash in her eyes, her left eye is looking a little bit to the left, her right eye straight on. Her perfect hair is slightly messy. What do we feel? Lust, immediately. At first seemingly because of her near perfect appearance, she’s undoubtedly beautiful, yet beautiful people are often photographed and not always loved, there’s something more here that makes us attracted to her. And again, it’s the magic ingredient, vulnerability. You can see that she’s not in control, she appears to be weak, she has in some part become submissive to the photographer’s desires, allowing the photographer to present her to us in a state of vulnerability. Because of this vulnerability, we start to fall for her because without vulnerability there is nothing to love. Without vulnerability there are only traits, good ones, bad ones, physical ones, intellectual ones, emotional ones. Still just traits nevertheless. People are never just a collection of traits, they are much more complicated. This complexity usually gets displayed in some form of vulnerability. Such a display of weakness that becomes immediately attractive because it makes a person an actual person, we relate because we are comforted by idea of not being the only ones broken and dysfunctional. And if a person is vulnerable, perhaps if we dare to show our own vulnerability then a bond can be formed and there’s just a chance that that bond will last forever. When I look at that portrait of Saffron Aldridge I can imagine she would be someone I could have a long, intimate conversation with. I can imagine making her cry, then brushing away her teared hair from her eyes, slowly lifting my hand from her face as my fingers run down her cheek, her awkwardly smiling to partly show her affection, partly make me feel better about the situation. Then again she doesn’t actually look to be that nice, I wouldn’t describe her as sweet. So I can also imagine her leaving soon after and avoiding me with a passion. As I write this I realise that photograph is the embodiment of the kind of vulnerability I’m attract- ed to most. The kind that someone is already taking advantage of, whether through serendipity or psychology I don’t know, but I do wonder why I keep falling for people who I will never have a relationship with? This portrait of Saffron Aldridge certainly isn’t an exception.

Perhaps it’s a form of laziness, always falling for people who are already in relationships, or who live too far or who I just for whatever other reason wouldn’t even be in a relationship with. Could I be keeping myself safe from actually having a relationship again? But then why did I subconsciously use photography as a means of getting to know Laura? Did I not know she was in a relationship? I actually can’t remember anymore, if I knew, or if I didn’t. Perhaps I pretended that she wasn’t even if I knew she was? But now it doesn’t matter anymore, what’s happened happened. And now I have the photographs to hold onto so even if it’s not real, or even if it will never be real, for a brief few seconds when I look at the photographs I can imagine it as if it were real, maybe that’s enough for me. Maybe I don’t need anything more than that.

Coming back to the notion of time in portraiture there really seem to be two schools of thought. One is that that you need a lot of time to start to under- stand a person in order to take a good portrait of them. You need to give your sitter time to become comfortable with the camera and this time allows you to break down the mask the sitter will put on on the first time of photo- graphing. The other is that the first impressions, the first impulses towards a person are probably more accurate than anything that can be developed over time. In his interview in 2012 with the National Portrait Gallery Nadav Kander describes his way of working. He says “I like to know how they look, so I recognise who is who when they talk in the door but that’s about it. I like the connection human beings have when there isn’t a great knowledge like when you first meet people. I would find it very hard to photograph someone that I knew well. I think that that tension when you first meet people allows you to communicate without speaking.” When I started this research I was almost totally opposed to the way Kander works, it seemed too much the viewpoint of the photographer towards the sitter at that very moment in time that the portrait was taken, giving virtually no control to the sitter herself. Even though I still believe that to be true, what I soon found out is that time has almost no influence on ratio of control of the photographer and the sitter on a portrait. A portrait, is almost always more of an image of the photographer than the sitter, it’s inevitable. Whether we like to admit it or not, we know ourselves and our understanding of others is totally based on the complexities of our own character. What I observe when I observe a sitter, is not her character, but the perception of her character through my own. As the time allowed for this observation is extended, my own complexities start to play a bigger and bigger role in understanding the character of the sitter. As I become closer to her, I start to form more of an opinion, she starts to become more my friend, my love, my obsession, my sitter. Whatever role she takes in my life it will be in my life and just as you would be afraid to confront or argue with your close friend, I too become afraid to confront or argue with the sitter I’m falling in love with. See time helps if you want to show the relationship between the photographer and the sitter, and sometimes showing the relationship is extremely important. However when you want to portray the sitter herself, then a first encounter might be more honest than any prolonged relationship clouded by the emotions of the photographer ever can be. Not to be misunderstood, you can never remove the maker from the image, but you can construct a situation where the makers understanding of the sitter is formed more by the sitter rather than the maker and a conscious manipulation of this ratio can start to be the key to successful portraiture.

There are more parallels than you’d think with falling in love and making a portrait. If we continue on the topic of the maker only understanding the sitter through his own characteristics, complexities and flaws then we can also look at the process of falling in love, which is oddly very similar. If we are to trust the social science on falling in love and why we often pick complicated partners instead of people that are more suited to our own personality traits, we quickly find out that there is a huge psychological history to our decisions about who we fall in love with. Since we are kids we are loved, first by our parents, then perhaps by our siblings, other kids from kindergarten or as we grow a little older from school. The community of people that love us is consistently growing and thus so is the personalities we notice as loving us. However these personalities are by no means perfect, they are, like people always are, utterly flawed, but as our experience of these personalities is the experience of feeling loved, we try to seek out these kinds of personalities as we grow into adults and start our own independent lives, away from the safety net of the community our families have provided for us thus far. In a sense, we fall in love with people who are able to mimic the feelings of love we received as kids, instead of the most profound, unequivocal kind of love that we often romanticise about. If I had to define love in a dry way, without saying that it’s just butterflies in the stomach or that special feeling (which is true but whatever) then I would define it like this; love is the acceptance of another persons limitations, vulnerability and tragedy. The people we fall in love with are those whose limitations, vulnerabilities and tragedies are familiar to those who’ve loved us before.

So since we before spoke about the different ways of approaching the dissection of the character of your sitter, lets now turn to the opposite of the strategy that Kander deploys and to the strategy that I thought before could work as a more honest approach to portraiture, giving perhaps a more true appearance of the sitter. For this I want to analyse the project of Robin de Puy titled “Randy”. When we go on de Puy’s website and have a look at how the project reveals itself to us, we get some pretty obvious clues about how she approaches portraiture. The first image we see is of her with her sitter, Randy. Immediately she establishes that her work is equally as much about the relationship between the photographer and the sitter than just the sitter. She makes it clear and doesn’t at all shy away from the notion that she is an incredibly significant part of the images themselves. As we go along we notice some some pretty significant overlap between the images. All of them are black & white, when Randy is standing the camera is, when Randy is laying the camera is. In many of the images Randy is shirtless. All have a certain sadness to them. Randy seems sweet but lonely. Like a good person but one that doesn’t use that trait much. I also get the feeling the photographer feels very emotional about Randy, she’s close to him. Could she too be falling in love with her sitter? Whatever the case, it’s obvious to me that Randy is not in control of the images, and that’s not to say that that is a bad thing. A photographer like de Puy has a meticulous way of seeing her sitter, the fact that she is totally in control of her image can turn out to offer a beautiful perspective and it doesn’t necessarily have to be somehow violent or negative toward her sitter. However it is completely her image and Randy has totally submitted himself to the photographer. And of course it’s difficult to determine whether de Puy is actually in control or if she is also simply falling into the trap of her emotions about Randy and having the images guided in that way rather than an informed study of the person. It’s again the tragedy that comes along with getting to know someone, we see what we want to see, we shape the person that we want them to be so we can love them. Our friends have plenty of flaws, annoying traits and weird habit but we mostly don’t notice them be- cause we are overwhelmed by all of the traits that we do actually love about them. Why would photographers be any different? Why would we imagine that de Puy’s work is anything but the documentation of her own relationship with Randy? It seems kind of an obvious thing to state, yet photographers usually shy away from admitting that that is the case. I suppose de Puy does that also, however the first image of her and Randy together do set the tone quite strongly for the images that follow and because of that, if we relate it again to falling in love, perhaps what we see most is the love between the photographer and the sitter, instead of the love we as viewers are compelled to feel towards Randy. I say compelled because Randy is obviously vulnerable in this project, and I still think it’s easy to feel a certain affection for that kind of vulnerability. Whether he’s in control of the images or not, he’s still in control of his existence itself, and to submit yourself to the photographer and agree to be put and controlled in such a vulnerable position is unquestionably brave, beautiful, something that would make us fall in love with him regardless of whether we’ve ever met him or actually know or understand the informative pieces of his life. Vulnerability is loveable, I don’t think there’s anything to argue about here.

However if vulnerability being loveable is so obvious, then surely other photographers have figured that out also. Surely vulnerability in photography is then not only used sincerely, but also for manipulation. Time to look at some- thing more commercial. This Scotch & Soda campaign is a perfect example of how the notion of vulnerability can be used to manipulate the viewer into affiliating the feeling of love, not with a particular type of person, but with
a brand. On the photograph above we see a man and a woman, the woman appears to be falling onto the man for comfort, the man looks into the dis- tance an appears weakened by what he sees. Both of them, but especially the women, display a certain fake vulnerability, however it might be enough to trick the untrained eye. An untrained eye that might see this photograph, see the beautifully fitted clothes and the rather elegant sounding brand, noticing that the two sitters appear to find the strength of the vulnerable in front of the camera. Why might that be? Might it be because only Scotch & Soda can make one feel confident enough to display weakness? I want to be like that too, one might think. Perhaps the clothes can make me display my vulnera- bility and perhaps by doing so, I will finally be vulnerable. People mimic what they love, and if somehow people fall in love with the models on a Scotch & Soda advert then who is to say they won’t be spending the big bucks in “a store near me” tomorrow? But guess what? This is not an authentic showcase of vulnerability, it’s simply photographic trickery.

Photographers have a responsibility to be honest about the way they portray their sitters, now in this campaign they are obviously models, the whole thing is fake and to most of us that’s probably obvious. But what it does illustrate is how the appearance of vulnerability doesn’t necessarily prove the existence of vulnerability itself. Photographers are good at creating and re-creating such an appearance if necessary, but that defeats the purpose of portraiture, in which who the sitter is, is incredibly relevant. You may have noticed that in this essay I have repeatedly and exclusively been using the word sitter to describe the person in front of the camera. This is for a very specific reason, in a portrait the person isn’t a subject, she isn’t a model, she’s not an actor, a prop or a tool for the photographer to tell his story. She’s a sitter, because she actually matters. It is important that she is that specific person who she is, and that is what separates portraiture from anything else. Who the sitter is ac- tually matters. The photographer makes the photograph, so his handwriting will always be included and there’s no way of escaping that. However why the photographer chooses that specific person to be his sitter is where things get interesting, it means the photographer thought that something about
this person was interesting, relevant, special even. Because of this dynamic, the sitter is given a certain amount of control and power. You chose me to
be your sitter, so prove to me that you’re worth it, might be the attitude of a sitter not afraid of the photographer. Now of course, the dynamic between the photographer and the sitter tends to be far more complicated than that, so the degree to which the sitter uses her power is always in flux, depending on the person, the time of day, the photographer and countless other factors. And yet, a sitter is always chosen for a reason, and by virtue, a sitter is as important in creating the portrait as the photographer. A model never is, and that’s why an authentic showcase of vulnerability demands the presence of a sitter, not mere flesh in front of the lens.

Finally we move on to and in many ways back to my original question.

What happens when you fall in love with your sitter? What happens when a photographer follows his primitive desires and instincts instead of working diligently on his practice? My sitter was Laura, when I started photographing her I wanted to find out how many portraits it would take to get to know a person? The question I should have been asking is how many portraits would it take to fall in love with a person? The answer to that, probably zero. Even though I pretend to be surprised at this turn of events, I probably shouldn’t be. From the beginning, people were asking me why are you photographing this specific person? I never gave a coherent answer, it was just a feeling I had, I wanted to photographer her, wasn’t that enough? I wanted to spend time with her, talk to her, observe her. I took advantage of my status as a pho- tographer to get to know Laura. Of course I dreamt up some intellectual and artistic reasons why this is somehow an urgent project to create. Naaaaah. Just a nice girl, classic. Then of course it turns out she has a boyfriend, or did I know that before? I don’t really remember... if I did I probably pretended
I didn’t... funny how the mind works, always tricking itself out of making logical decisions. But now what? I’m not going to pretend I’ll ever have a relationship with her so all is all there is to do is see how far photography can take this totally disfunctional love story?

I started off photographing her in the studio, and initially I thought I would stay in the studio for longer, in a sense applying the methodology of a more Kander type portrait, except repeatedly and over a longer period of time. Portraits are good at giving subtle clues towards a persons inner workings, yet people are overly complex and portraits are usually weak at communicating this complexity, thus I thought that many portraits of the same person would go further at communicating this complexity. When I’m taking someones portrait my methodology involves a lot of talking, I set up the space mostly to encourage conversation, not even to make for a good portrait. There are always two chairs, one for the sitter, one for me. Between them about 2 meters. A light, sometimes a couple, will shine on to the sitter. I never shoot in a dark room, the window blinds are always open and if necessary the light of the studio are on. I want to be seen, I don’t want to blend in to the darkness. As we chat, talk and converse, I start asking the sitter questions about her life, personality, certain physical clues that I observe about her like fiddling with her jewellery or pinching her arms. From time to time I raise the camera to my eye, and take a photograph. Sometimes I keep it there for a couple of minutes and continue talking, or just observe the sitter in silence, waiting for the tension in her face to let go for a fraction of a second. I find this strategy to work for myself quite well when I meet the sitter once, and after that never again, or if it’s someone that I am extremely curious about, yet will never probably have a deep emotional connection to. With Laura it was more com- plicated because the conversation did more than just enlighten me about her personality. It no doubt did that, but through that discovery I also started to slowly but surely fall for her, and this makes making portraiture a tragedy. It means that your already clouded judgement (because all judgement is cloud- ed) becomes even more hazier than you are used to, and the portraits become so much more portraits of yourself than of the sitter, kind of defeating the beauty in portraiture that both the photographer and the sitter have some sort of authority over the photograph. So, slowly but surely Laura went from being a sitter to a muse, perhaps even a mild obsession. Naturally that change in role also changed the environment I wanted to photographer her, her home, my home, beach, forest, places in between. What ended up happening was that the Kander approach of studio, photographer, sitter, emphasising light, and the more de Puy approach of on location, personal, relationship, and blatantly objective started to slowly merge, encompassing first Laura’s vulnerability, and then the photographer stepping in more and more to in some sense take advantage of that vulnerability. At least that’s what the process has felt like for me, I see it in the images and I don’t at the same time, it’s actually been quite a bit of a struggle to be so fluid in this project, mostly because I let myself be guided by emotion. It’s not something I’d recommend for myself to do again, it’s important to be in control in photography, both of the diligent work but also of the serendipity you can allow for when setting the stage in a habitable way. However completely going with the flow, letting your feelings guide the work and creating a completely dysfunctional relation- ship in the process, complicates things to a severe degree.

When we talk about vulnerability in portraiture we always focus on the sitter, never the photographer. The photographer is always seen as a diligent, tal- ented, hard-working genius of the craft. But nothing could be further from the truth. Photographers are equally as dysfunctional, complex, useless, con- fused and vulnerable than anybody else. And that’s where the whole process of portraiture gets so complicated, it’s hard work. As a photographer I don’t only have to take the picture, I have to be aware of my own complexities, vulnerabilities and motivations for making a picture. Motivations that are so easily corrupted by silly emotions, a complex habit of falling in love with people whom I shouldn’t. I have a huge amount of vulnerabilities myself that I have to keep in check in order to perform as a portrait maker. You could also of course argue the opposite and say that I could also embrace my vulnerabilities, but where does that get me? That will leave me trapped in the corruption of my own personality. The whole point of creating anything is to step out of that. So to conclude, portraiture is basically a balancing act of vulnerability. Both of the photographer and the sitter. When the two are balanced perfectly, the vulnerability of the photographer will allow the sitter to express her own, and also allow the photographer to understand the sitters vulnerability in an authentic way. However this balance is very fragile, it’s easy to fall in love with your sitter, and it’s easy to become a mere observer of flesh. It’s much harder to listen, understand, analyse, and through the complexities and vulnerabilities of your own character, see something in the sitter that nobody else has seen before.

Bibliography

The Book of Life
Chapter 1, Relationships: Compatibility
“Why we’re compelled to love difficult people”
Web link: https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/why-were-com- pelled-to-love-difficult-people/

Interview
Road to 2012: Aiming high - Nadav Kander
Publisher: National Portrait Gallery
Web link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP4twN7187g

Project
“Randy”
Author: Robin de Puy
Web link: http://www.robindepuy.nl/randy/story

Campaign
Scotch & Soda
“From Amsterdam, From everywhere 2017”

Documentary
“Abstract: The art of design, Platon: Photography” Published by Netflix

“Why do we love? A philosophical enquiry Skye C. Cleary
Published by Ted-Ed

and lastly, my own project of photographing Laura was crucial for this text, for me it very much also served as a reflection on the research I did through making images.