Great Portraits

If anyone would know what makes a great portrait it would a photographer from the show A New American Portrait, right? So we simply asked them about their favourite portraits. In alphabetical order...

Christine Collins: "In thinking about how to answer your question, I realized that I love a lot of portraits and it was almost painful to leave some out. People are endlessly interesting and the way photographers choose to represent them is the stuff of magic. I've seen my students make some amazing portraits - brave, real, unflinching portraits and that's been amazing to watch. To pick favorites seems as hard and arbitrary as picking favorite songs or films (questions I dread). Don't those answers change too often to record? So in response, here are (for the moment) a few of my favorites on a list that is always changing. These are some of the images that make me catch my breath. Every time I see them.

"Andrea Modica, 'Treadwell, New York, 2000': Barbara, Modica's subject and collaborator for fifteen years, passed away in 2001 with complications due to diabetes. They both knew she was fatally ill when they made this photograph. To have made this photograph (with that knowledge) feels like a gift. It is, at once, delightful and heartbreaking.

"Tina Barney, 'Mrs. Barney’s Porch, 1982': I do not know for a fact that this woman is Barney's mother-in-law, but in the short story in my head she is. I love all the choices that were made in this photograph: the subject's choice to wear her pearls with her bathrobe, the photographer's choice to include the furniture in the foreground. Both are so telling and the divide created by those chairs seems impossible to cross.

"Richard Collins, 'Untitled, 1971' [see above]: My father made this photograph of my mother on their honeymoon in Maine. For me, the picture offers both a sense of the familiar and the suggestion of all those things we can never know about our parents. It's my favorite kind of photograph, one that is perfectly descriptive and mysterious at the same time."

Jennifer Davis: "I decided to make a top 5 list (in no particular order)...
Diane Arbus - A family on their lawn one sunday in Westchester, NY 1968
Elinor Carucci - Eran and I, 1998
William Eggleston - (Women in flower print dress on flower print couch) Jackson, Mississippi
Tina Barney - Jill and Polly in the Bathroom, 1987
Gary Winogrand - World's Fair 1964"

Ben Donaldson: "This photograph is from Nicholas Nixon's pictures in nursing homes.

"I had bought an 8x10 view camera in 1994, not knowing what it really was. I was studying painting, but had been taking pictures to paint portraits from. I happened to find Nick Nixon's book "Pictures of People"and was truly shocked and profoundly changed by the forthright quality of how daring and original they were. I stopped painting at this time, and applied to the MassArt photo program (where I had been studying painting). I studied photography with Nick and a few their teachers there that used the view camera in interesting ways (Abe Morrell, Virginia Behan and Laura McPhee and others). It was the best school I could have ever imagined.

"This picture in particular convinced me that photography was an art form that could be used to make lucid statements about life in ways that I hadn't realized before. It is a simply a picture of a hand. The particular detail derived from the large negative gives the picture specificity beyond belief, however. The stain on the table is heartbreaking in ways only something like that can be in a picture. The hand seems alert however, despite it's age. It's a bittersweet photograph to me. I still am moved by it, and I derive from it strength to make pictures that matter."

Amy Elkins: "It's hard for me to narrow down a favorite portrait photographer, and even tougher to narrow down a specific portrait. However if I had to choose a portrait photographer that inspires me greatly it would have to be Rineke Dijkstra. Her beach portraits, Spanish bullfighters, Mothers and the series on Almerisa, the young Bosnian girl. Her portraits not only speak to me of a psychological intensity within each of her sitters lives, but also the intensity of sharing a moment with her camera. Her work seems to be very much about the passing of time and the physical, emotional and psychological changes that surface with that passing. Her work was brought to my attention when somebody commented that my 'Wallflower' portraits reminded them of one of her Bullfighter portraits. We definitely have similar interests when making portraits of our subjects. "

Peter Haakon Thompson: "I have lately been really fascinated with some photos that a friend, Mike Hoyt, has taken in the Norae (Song) Shanty, which is part of a project that I do besides photography!? called the Art Shanty (basically a bunch of artists re-imagining the purpose of an ice fishing shanty. Mike's pictures of people singing karaoke in the Norae can be found here and here. He has hundreds (which I know does not really help your cause), but that is part of what makes them so cool to me, the sort of cross section of people who are willing to sing songs in public. All shot in this same small 8'x8' space. My faves are probably in the first link."

Todd Hido: "Even though much of my own work is pictures of places my entire collection of photographs made by other people are all portraits. I have portraits hung at my home and studio by E. J. Bellocq, August Sander, Helen Levitt, Alec Soth, Larry Sultan, and Jim Goldberg.

"I love them all very much and living with these great works has certainly seeped into my practice.

"But none has made more of an impact on me than this snapshot of my mother.

"I swiped it from our family albums. Somehow we have moments saved in there forever that you'd think a family would not want to remember?

"Probably my dad took this, because basically he’s getting her to pose like the people in those 80's pornography magazines—like a “reader’s wives” section or stuff like that. That’s definitely where this kind of picture comes from. I remember looking at his magazines when I was a kid, and I remember seeing stuff like that.

"That maybe not what this is exactly?—even though this is a pose I never saw her in in daily life.

"What is of concern to me here is she seems to not be happy about having her picture taken. Where that comes from is when my dad would come home drunk and get her to do these things. It was pretty horrific for a boy to see. It is the root of many of my current portraits. This expression and feeling can be found throughout my pictures and that is why it is so important to me. It is a faded 4x4 gateway into my work."

Alec Soth: "I can write about photography all day. But the best pictures, the ones that take my breath away, leave me struggling for words. There is no better example than Louis Faurer’s picture of Eddie. There is nothing else to say." [unfortunately, the above image is the largest to be found online, and blowing it up reduces its quality too much, so I decided to keep the small size - JMC]

Brian Ulrich: "Portraits might just be the hardest photographs to make. Eternally problematic, capturing ones likeness in such high resolution equally fascinates and scares the pants off so many since the invention of photography. Power dynamics, psychological self exploration and projecting seem to be only the tip of the iceberg. In fact it seems one cannot do much to describe the act of meeting someone and asking them to 'perform themselves' in front of a camera. I tell students all the time, it's frankly weird so get used to it.

"I can tell you that one of the most amazing things in the world is to watch someone from behind the camera as they sit, still and motionless in a frozen stance you may or may not have dictated for them. I myself have bad habits that contribute to this obsessiveness. I count lines in people's face, take notes on fingernails in trains, and generally look for visual clues that might be helpful at some point for a picture, other times just curiosity.

"We're perplexed by each other. Perpetual voyeurs and so much of our contemporary world seems about looking at each other in various states of performance and non-performance. I could go on... but Joerg asked for one picture and one stuck in my head (besides Duane Hanson) is the portrait below of Lewis Payne by Alexander Gardener. This image charged with such performance seems to show a sitter well aware of the power of the photograph. His confrontational gaze is one in which he appears all too aware will affect many generations. A last call, a fuck you, or perhaps a love letter. This would be assassin peered into that obscura box lens and may have even been focused on his reflection in such a predicament.

"Why I love this image is why I love good fiction. I can lose myself in it. And like some good writing, the character is described so well that love or hate I have no choice but to have a visceral reaction. I feel like I know this person though the image.

"Gardener who had cut his teeth photographing the civil war for Mathew Brady and later portraits of policitians described his work as: 'It is designed to speak for itself. As mementos of the fearful struggle through which the country has just passed, it is confidently hoped that it will possess an enduring interest.' Enduring indeed."

Shen Wei: "After searching many of my favorite portraits, I have settled down with two of the legends. It was a class about Diane Arbus [Shen's other pick] and a book of Nan Goldin affected me so much that I decided to become a photographer. For me, a good portrait is when I can gradually incubate a connection to the person in the photograph and start to care about the person in the photograph."

Comments

[luke]

too bad i'm not going to be able to see the show (in india now), the interviews make it sound really interesting. the large format picture of the hand is especially interesting, i've been shooting on medium format film for a while now, but am finding myself more and more drawn to larger formats ....

[C H Paquette]

This looks like a great show.... I will definitely be seeing it soon. Thanks for posting these interviews, they are very interesting.

[sohbet]

Thank you very much for this incredibly well written editorial!