In my last picture this week, I really wanted to work with a live subject. I was trying to accomplish the deadpan, natural look discussed in chapter three of The Photograph as Contemporary Art. However, constructing that kind of image is so incredibly difficult, especially considering that I was photographing my roommate.
It seemed impossible to catch that almost sterile, but natural, expression needed for a photograph like this when shooting a subject who is completely aware that someone is trying to take their picture. I don’t know how many times I found myself saying something like, “You don’t need to smile - no one that cares about you will see this image.” I really wanted the subject to make eye contact in the photograph, but as I continued to shoot, that result seemed like a more and more unlikely. The image I ended up positing is an extreme compromise: there’s no eye contact and the subject’s eyes are virtually closed. I think the end result is more “detached” rather than “natural” or “deadpan”.
This particular exercise, more so than any other I tried to execute, really began to emphasize the voyeuristic sensibilities which are inherent to photography. If I was to end up with a shoot that I would have been happy with, I would have needed my subject to take herself to a place where she was completely isolated: I was trying to get something really raw out of her. When the task got really difficult, I kept wondering why someone would be interested in “deadpan” photographs; is it about the desire to relate? Do these kinds of photos show us that all of humanity can be reduced to a single apparently apathetic state? If so, what does that need say about us as an audience? About us as a society of social beings?
good questions - my sense of dead pan photographs with people in them is that, often, their aim is to puzzle us - they *look* as though there might be a story to be told, whether about the circumstances of that moment, or about the (unreadable) character of the person (if you look at a number of Jeff Wall's photographs, this should show exactly what I mean). The trouble with your subject is that she looks comfortably half sleep - and that's the story about how she got to be under the comforter, and how she feels about it. A straight-at-the-camera gaze - because that's not what you expect from someone in that position, unless they themselves are wondering what's going to happen next or how they came to be there - opens up questions that the spectator can't answer - the best we can do is offer narrative hypotheses, which come out of our imagination.
ReplyDeleteBut as you've found out, working with a model is very, very hard. Perhaps I should have us all bring in cameras and we can use each other as models? - being able to be dead-pan might work better as a class exercise than domestically???
I love the way that you're working at this exercise through the taking of photographs, and through finding out that it's not (apart from those rare lucky moments) necessarily an easy thing to do...not if one wants to produce an image that's interesting to look at, which yours are - I *particularly* like the plate underside...