Pho 111 IDM Fall 2014: Portraits of Self, Portraits of Others

Portraits of Self, Portraits of Others

Emmit Gowin

Today, in class, talked about Portraiture. I showed some great portrait artists and then we got into groups and started to photograph one another.

Finding Vivian Maier, trailer

Richard Avedon, "Darkness and Light"

I showed the Vivian Maier trailer video and also part 1 of this video on Richard Avedon. The Avedon video is a bit long; I only showed the first 30 minutes or so. (But you are welcome to watch it in it's entirety. It's quite good.)

Your project for the week is:

Find five great portrait photographers online. I want you to tell me who took the pictures and why you like the images, and then add them to your blog in one post before next class.

(So: An image of theirs. Their name. And what you like about the picture / why you chose them.)

I've included some photographers to look at for inspiration at the bottom of the post.

Your goal for the week is to make is to make great portraits of other people and also yourself. The photograph needs to be strong compositionally, be interesting to look at, and should tell us something about the person being photographed. A pretty tall order... sounds a lot like a collaboration between the subject and the photographer to me... You should have at least 5 GREAT images. (At least 1 must be a self-portait.)

Make sure you bring your pictures with you to next class, on your hard drive.

ALL OF THEM. We will work on basic image editing next week.

The following images were made by Edward Curtis, he is the fellow on the right with the fine hat and goatee. He started this project to record the way of life of the North American Indian in 1907, and made more than 40,000 images of them. You can see many of them at the Library of Congress.