Class Pictures is a collection of portraits of an economically and racially diverse group of high school students. The dignity, pride and intimacy of the large-scale color portraits contrasted with popular media images of young African-Americans and underscored the absence of these men in traditional art history.īey’s book of portraits-published by Aperture- Class Pictures, is one I’ve gone back to again and again. His work at the time upended expectations by depicting young African-American men and other racially diverse men in poses that echoed postures of historical portrait paintings. My professor, photographer Dawoud Bey was the first to really impress upon me how formal portrait photography could be both artfully disruptive and socially important. Is the photographer empathetic or opportunistic? Is it possible to be both? Is the photographer testing our expectations and visual consumption, or adding to the heap of stereotypes and reinforcing social norms?
Who is doing the looking is important too. This is a fundamental puzzle of being-and this spectacle, the collision of internal and external worlds and intentions is often what makes portraits compelling. These spheres, of internal feeling and being, can’t be reconciled with how we look on the outside, and how we appear to other people. Technically, we know better, but we still look for “truth” in portraits.Īnother paradox in portraiture is connected to our basic humanity-the fact that how we look is not how we feel.Īnother paradox in portraiture is connected to our basic humanity-the fact that how we look is not how we feel. However, emotionally and spiritually, the temptation to try and do just that is too powerful to ignore. Intellectually, we are aware that we can’t know a person from simply looking at them, much less from a mute photograph. More often what we are seeing is powerfully influenced by context, our own biases and preferences and those of the photographer. We know a photograph can’t actually “capture” anything essential about people in the photographs.
Paradoxes lie at the heart of great photographic portraits.