Photography Articles & Tips
Portraiture: the Pleasure of Knowing People
By Len Bernstein
The criterion for any successful work of art and why it moves us, was given by the American philosopher and founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel, when he stated: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." Surface and depth are opposites crucial to any portrait: the camera shows the surface of things, and a good photographer uses surface to be fair to an individual's depths. This desire to be just makes for beauty, and it has only one enemy: contempt, the common feeling I described in myself earlier--that lessening the value of people and things makes us more important.
The
first time I saw this clearly in myself, I thought, "Oh
my god, I do go down the street making fun of how people look,
hoping to find flaws in them! I can't just turn that off when
I look through the camera." I was learning how the slightest
twinge of superiority in a photographer cripples his ability
to be fair to the subject; it makes him ashamed. It is also
responsible for the ordinary pain of domestic life, and the
worst aspects of humanity. How much suffering has come
from using surface appearance--the way a person looks or dresses,
the color of their skin--to
dismiss their thoughts and feelings and act superior? I
am everlastingly grateful to Mr. Siegel for explaining that
beauty itself arises from the kind, exact way of seeing people
we need to have every moment, for the man or woman we stand
next to in a subway car, or the person who waits on us in a
restaurant, let alone a loved one sitting across from us at
the breakfast table.
When I saw this man on the street I felt he had stature, dignity
and felt impelled to introduce myself and ask to photograph
him.
When
he told me he had fought and been wounded in the Korean War,
I felt at a loss and simply said that I had no idea what it
must have felt like to be a black man in America in 1950 going
off to fight in the Korean War. His expression is a mingling
of bitter weariness and yearning. There is an energetic line
that sweeps upward through the diagonal strap across his chest,
around the curve of his collar and tilted head and cap, leading
our eye toward the brightest area of the photograph--a corner
of sky in the upper right. This effect counters the feeling
of sadness and intensifies
it.
A question that can help us see a person's depths is one which
Eli Siegel said a photographer could ask before taking his
or her portrait, "What quality would you like to represent
you in a photograph?"
