Photography // Portraits as an image but not an identity

"Identity is not a fixed thing, and no person is one-dimensional, so the idea that a single photograph can stand in for the totality of a person is a polite fiction at best." – Phillip Prodger

Fleeting Truths: Thoughts on Portrait Photography

A fantastic article with photographer Phillip Prodger on why we shouldn't consider portrait images to be the end all and be all of the identity of the person photographed.

It's something I especially encounter when photographing actors for theatre, film and television—often times when sitting to shoot character portraits it's hard to see where the actor ends and the character begins and so it becomes unclear who it is exactly you're shooting. A look here, a slight adjustment to posture there. You take a shot and you've captured an incredible emotion that is fictional—the look of a character and story brought into being for a split second by an incredible professional talent. The final image might bring tears to the person who sees it but its origins are fictitious.

And my style of photographer, extending from my history as an illustrator, forces me to consider photography as a story-telling medium. I prefer to craft and exhibit series of images that have a beginning, middle and end, because it provides context for the single image. A single image may contain great meaning but a single portrait is often contextually void—is a look angry, frustrated, or concerned? Sometimes its hard to tell without seeing what came before it. Sometimes it just boredom on the face of a model, or a moment of serious focus listening for the punchline of a joke. The next frame might have been uproarious laughter.


Prodger draws comparison between film, motion and still image, describing how they're becoming quickly linked—the language of film informing the vocabulary of the photographer. Directors and actors Jo Stone and Paulo Castro of Stone / Castro Productions have described my photography as "cinematic" in the way that I captured their performance of 'The Country' by Martin Crimp. I shot still frames the same I would have for film and television and the comparison is legitimate.

Nathan O'Keefe and Natalia Sledz in 'The Country' by Martin Crimp, directed by Paulo Castro // Stone/Castro Productions © Daniel Purvis

Stage and lighting design for 'The Country' by David Lampard and Daniel Barber © Daniel Purvis

I'm looking for shots that create a sense of distance, that heighten drama, cropping in to create tighter portraits full of emotion, narrowing the large space of the theatre. If you were to stand in the crowd you'd see the large, flat, dilapidated fronting of an old farm house and you'd view the actors walking back and forth across this set in its entirety. Instead, I charge in and capture that single moment of pain, shock and panic and freeze it. Tight and sharp. Agony and pain made large where live you may have only heard it in a voice. But it's a story—a single image can only give a glimpse of what the story entails. None of them is a whole story in itself.

And so Prodger describes "Narratives no longer have to be complete to be meaningful. Photographic storytelling is more about networks, nodes, and webs than it is about concise statements. In this world, relationships between images become central." And at the National Portrait Gallery of London has facilitated the acceptance of portrait series in addition to the single image, which gives me hope. Where a single image might split time, I feel a series of still images does more than minutes of motion capture to tell stories. It provides us the ability to take this network of nodes and then allow our minds to fill in the gaps. We don't need to see everything, and it's the photographers duty to pick the most poignant moments.

Anyway... enough rambling.

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"...we’re just messy, organic beings, full of contradictions, uncertainties, inner thoughts and outer projections. Who we are is indefinable and unmeasurable."

"Photography excels at splitting seconds, not surveying lifetimes. It is by nature mechanical and distant, not warm and knowing. On paper, it is the worst possible tool for portraiture. Yet there is something undeniably magnetic about photo portraiture that defies easy explanation."