“Avedon never made any pretence to objectivity; the notion of the dispassionate lens he wrote off as delusion. His work, he said, was at least as much about him as his subjects: a vast collective self-portrait of the compulsions he projected on to America’s faces and figures. […] As hip as he mostly was, Avedon was, at root, an old-style Jewish moralist whose texts were written in freckles and furrows, pits and pocks. Sometimes those marks and blemishes, which stood out so sharply in front of the white sheet against which his subjects posed, were lit as poetic expressions of the persona. Avedon took delight in tweaking - or annihilating - the expected icon.” (story)
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People often tell me that Thomas Ruff’s portraits are boring. What does that mean: “boring”? How can a portrait be boring?
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I remember a while ago, I was writing a post about my favourite classic portraits, and I wanted to include Richard Avedon’s portraiture of his father - which I couldn’t find online. I suppose the obvious did not occur to me, namely to look on the Richard Avedon website (in my defense, it appears as if the website has been expanded quite a bit since my prior visits). So it took Miguel’s post to remind me of that work, and to tell me where to look.
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When discussing what “makes” a great portrait with Exposure Compensation’s Miguel Garcia-Guzman, we quickly realized that we couldn’t really agree on much. So we figured we might as well ask some other people, and we sent out an email to a large number of photographers, fine art and commercial, bloggers, curators, editors, and gallerists: “What makes a good portrait? Could you provide us an example of a portrait that you really like - either from your or someone else’s work - and say why the portrait works so well for you?” to publish what we would get back on our blogs, as a collaborative effort to get a little bit closer to understanding the topic. Below is what we got back from those who managed to find the time to write something. Our thanks to everybody who contributed!
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