Exercise
Produce a series of five portraits that use some of the types of gaze defined above.
Outcome
I have reinterpreted this exercise slightly.
Whilst at the National Portrait Gallery recently, I came across a picture of Kate Moss by Corrine Day (see fig. 1). What struck me about this picture is that the different poses combine to give a sense of Kate’s character, or at least that is the perception for the viewer. The poses are not all serious in nature, although perhaps the far right image on the middle row is the most serious.
I am carrying out this exercise during the times of the COVID-19 lockdown and so the opportunities to go out find subjects, or tell stories with different backdrop are pretty limited. I decided to use Day’s image as an inspiration for my exercise and produce something similar using my wife as the subject.
I provided a certain degree of direction in terms of asking her to look down the lens, to the left of the lens, not to smile, to smile, etc. But I did not do much more than that.
All of the images are shown in the contact sheet and I then combined my nine favourite images into the single frame to produce the image below.
Image
Contact Sheets
Learning
Earlier in this module I took some posed images of Jude working in a pub, and at the time I commented on how it was to take an image that did not look posed. I found the same here, even when there is no background, just a head shot, I can tell which images are posed and which are just natural images of my wife. The learning is that if one is going to have an image posed, then this needs to be given consideration, or perhaps sometimes it would be better to acknowledge this and make the image overtly posed so that there is no ‘conflict’ in the viewers mind.
Getting rid of a smile is difficult. My wife is a naturally happy and smiley person. The hardest gaze to achieve in this shoot was a serious one. The closest I came was the image that is top right. In terms of my objective, which was to show her character, this is not such a bad thing. But if the objective had been to portray a serious topic, the outcome would have been harder – although in the context of creating a serious image, maybe it would be easier not to smile.
Figures
Figure 1. Day, C., 2006. Kate Moss. [image] Available at: <https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw129573/Kate-Moss?> [Accessed 14 March 2020].