As a portrait photographer, and I can only speak about how I work, what I try to do is
find something that neither the sitter, nor I, really know is going to come. So, it’s
not a battle, it’s not a quest, it’s not a manipulative, you know, force that’s trying
to pull something out. But what you’re trying to do is just slow things down for that little
moment, then you go [makes a sound to indicate that he’s taking a photo] that’s it.
In order to have a successful portrait, there really has to be this sort of transaction,
if you will. I guess a way to describe it is there’s a kind of complicitness between
the sitter and the photographer.
Generally when’s someone saying to me, “how do you do a good portrait?” I say, “find
someone interesting,” you know because generally people with an interesting life have an interest
in life, so a lot of artists like that.
Lee Miller was an American photographer who actually started out on the other side of
the camera. She was a model. She worked with Man Ray in Paris and assisted him in his printing,
and was also his lover and his muse, and was the inspiration for many of his portraits.
Her background of being a model and understanding how to, sort of, perform for the camera, and
how to present one’s best image, if you will, very much informed her own portrait
making then.
Her portraits, while they’re of, sort of, renowned artists and document people that
were involved in the surrealist movement at the time, they were also her friends, and
it was her social group; but then you have her more formal portraits, for example the
portrait of Joseph Cornell. His art was one of 3D, it wasn’t necessary 2D, and so to
have him represented in this way makes perfect sense
in, sort of, conveying his personality, who he is.
Warhol really is the key artist in understanding the importance of photography for art and
the paintings that he produced from them, early 1960s onwards, are actually based on
photographs in which he really did very little to alter the image. He would impose colour
on top of it but the photographic image stayed as it was. This was the very, sort of, heart
of the way he saw modern society was working.
A lot of the people he took photographs of in the ‘70s and ‘80s were people he knew,
particularly in the New York art world.
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer who really came to providence in the 1970s
and 1980s. He gained quite a bit of notoriety for some of his images in depicting, sort
of, homoerotic portraits.
With all of Mapplethorpe’s portraits there was a, sort of, deep-rooted respect for the
sitter, and none more so when the sitter happened to be an artist. People like Andy Warhol he
very much admired for their ability to, sort of, position themselves and their artwork
within this larger sphere, if you will.
Mapplethorpe had a very high regard for Andy Warhol’s work and, in fact, they showed
together in 1983, but by this time Mapplethorpe was starting to make a name for himself and
Warhol was slightly … I wouldn’t say uneasy, but he was, sort of, very wary of this young
upstart.
Robert Mapplethorpe was fascinated by that whole period in time. You know, Manhattan
was happening, there was Max’s,
there was all, you know, these energies and Warhol would have the back room
and it would be all the, those and suches; those, and the avant-garde art world, and
Mapplethorpe wanted to break in … they all wanted to break in to that. And I love that
idea of that photograph, with Warhol’s head just floating, because it grew to the point
someone who was really keen to join that circle, I think seen through that circle, or saw that
circle for what it was, and I like the idea, or I get the feeling that he just wanted to
cut that off from him.
One thing that can certainly contribute to a successful portrait is, of course, the planning
for it. If you think of, perhaps say, the portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe, there’s
been great attention paid to the lighting, to the positioning of the sitter. This is
very much a, sort of, performance, where he, sort of, has an idea in his mind, you know,
how he wants to, sort of, construct the image and how he’s going to shoot the scene.
We’re not really getting an insight into their personal lives, we’re not really seeing
them, you know, caught in a spontaneous informal setting; it’s very much a deliberate, kind
of, marketing of their image. If you compare that to the Lee Miller of Pablo Picasso, she’s
sort of almost caught him unawares, there’s a very informal quality to it, but he’s
staring directly at the camera. I like to think that that was him, sort of, looking
at Lee and, sort of, sizing her up, already thinking in his mind that he was going to
paint her.
In a way it’s hard to describe what makes a successful portrait because there’s so
many different elements and factors that, sort of, come into it, but I think if you,
sort of, strip it down, it really does come back to this, sort of, chemistry between the
photographer and the sitter. I think that’s where you get the successful image.