On Portraiture: Part I

Well, here we are again. More time has come and gone. November marches toward its end, and I find myself sitting in front of my laptop with the urge to put down a few more words. No photo story this time, instead I want to talk about portraiture. If you’ve spent some time on the website prior to this, you’ll have noticed that I used to have some little introductions to each of my galleries where I would talk about my approach or offer some thoughts as a preface to the images. One thing I started to notice though when watching people navigate my site in person was that every single one of them scrolled past the words, some of them rather quickly, to get to the images, as if the words didn’t matter at all. This seemed strange at first, but then I remembered we live in the modern day where just getting people to even look at still images at all is becoming more and more difficult as the collective attention span seems to be dwindling and most people just want to be fed a video or a reel rather than sit quietly with some words or a picture which might require some thought. I suppose it does make a certain kind of sense. You don’t go to most photography websites to read, you go to be dazzled with pictures. All that is to say that I removed the bulk of those intro bits, with the intent that I’ll just roll them into my blog and let the photos in the gallery speak for themselves. Since I’ve been working in portraiture from the beginning, it seemed like as good a place as any to start.

I always think life is strange. When I first began as a photographer, portraiture wasn’t really something I was very interested in. I knew I’d have to try it eventually if I wanted to make a living with a camera, but the first 6 months or so, I routinely avoided photographing people, preferring instead to point the camera at scenes which I thought were interesting, trusting that it would capture something “cool” and I’d be able to “edit” the photo enough to make it worth looking at. I had no clue what I was doing artistically. Mostly I was just trying to learn the basics of exposure and make sure I knew how to shoot a competent, exposed photograph. Those early collections are filled with bridges and barns and random bushes and trees and whatever else, nothing compelling whatsoever, but they’re fun records of where I began. During this time, I was enrolled in a local community college photo program. Because I didn’t enroll until the winter quarter, all of the “good” classes were full, but I managed to get into Digital Photography and Visual Critical Thinking, and thank goodness it was those two because that would end up being all of the schooling I would want, need or be able to stand. I’ll save detailed stories about those classes and that whole time in school and what I think about it for a different musing somewhere down the line. What’s important for this story is that in the digital photo class we had weekly assignments based around all the different genre of photography, and around the 7th or 8th week we had a portrait assignment. The head of the program at that time also happened to be the photographer who had made my senior pictures some 17 years prior and he was our guest instructor for the portrait assignment. He had us do a couple of different exercises with partners and classmates including one where we had to sit still for something like 45 seconds before letting our partner make a portrait which was meant to emulate tintypes and the old style but also to show us how the variety of changes that the human face could undergo in that time. It did not take me long to see the possibilities, which were as limitless as the bounds of human expression. I produced some very pedestrian images and was graded accordingly, but that assignment was enough to put my mind in that space.

I dabbled a bit more until the quarter was over, shooting mostly classmates and my kids who were so young at the time. I left school in spring and started to make my own way, still remembering and always thinking about portrait work and what I could do and say with it. My nephew Tyler - who features in many portraits in my gallery - had super long dreadlocks in those days, and I thought it would be so cool to make some portraits of him with his hair. Those first photos of Tyler were pretty decent, he played guitar and whipped his dreads around and I took probably 300 photos, I had yet to learn to pre-visualize and I was still trusting the camera to capture something “cool”. We definitely did and although the portraits don’t stand up to my later work, it was enough. I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Another time, on a random walk around at the park I ran into a photographer who was working with a model. I had my camera (at that time it was a Canon 6D) with the big white 70-200 f/2.8 L Lens on it (not a lens I’d personally recommend, although many people swear by it, hence its presence in my bag for that short time) and they approached me and we started up a conversation. I asked if I could take a few photographs of the model, whose name I no longer remember (those photos were lost in the hard drive crash which consumed most of my early work) and I spent maybe 15 minutes with her. After she left with her mother, I talked to the other photographer for a while and she suggested I look into modeling groups on Facebook where you could trade photos with experienced models. I still recommend this to beginners today. Having someone who knows how to be on camera is huge when you’re first starting out and not comfortable with settings or posing or anything.

I spent the rest of that year working with models from around the area. Without a doubt that experience sped up my learning, it took the pressure off and allowed me to focus purely on learning the craft. I wish I still had all of the photos from those days. What images survive serve as a testament to how quickly I was learning and applying each new lesson. It wasn’t long until I started to think beyond “photo shoots” and began exploring thematic work and storytelling. On a random walk one day I met with and managed to convince the owner of an historic south hill mansion to let me use the place as a set for a day. Armed with some big ideas, vintage dresses, a clown makeup, two assistants (who were really just friends who wanted to help) and a model I could trust (Jessica, with whom I still work with regularly) I spent the day there experimenting and made several portraits that still stand as some of my best work. One of which is the thumbnail image for this blog post. I wish that I had the skills I have now, but that’s as may be. During these years I tried my hand at senior portraits and weddings and family photos as well, with varying degrees of success. However, it quickly became clear to me that these avenues weren’t it for me. There was always something missing in those photos, the craft and care that appeared in my personal work was absent from any of the client work and it took me a few more years before I understood why that was and what I could do about it.

It wasn’t long until I realized that I needed a better understanding of light. Up to that point, I had been relying on available light for my portraits and I could start to see how this was a weakness in my work. If the light was good on a certain day, or if I’d picked a place with nice open shade, the portraits would look great. But if the light was too harsh or unforgiving, I would come home with almost nothing worth looking at outside of the occasional lucky shot, oh, how I grew to despise the lucky shot. And so began the odyssey of understanding how I could use and shape light to craft my portraits. It took some time, of course. First of all, there are so many options for lighting. You have all different sizes of speed lights and strobe lights and all different wattages, and then you have to tackle lighting modifiers and which ones will work for the looks you’re trying to achieve and then how do you use it all? How do you know how strong the light should be? How far from the subject should it be? What camera settings do you use? It can be, and was, overwhelming at first. A lot of photographers freeze up at this point, too overwhelmed by it all. I just jumped in, got a cheap 200 watt strobe and a couple different modifiers and went to work. I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time, so mainly I spent the time learning lighting by photographing myself. I do have some of those pictures somewhere and they’re so funny. I wasn’t really doing it for an audience, so I would wear a crown, or brandish a sword, or look away from the camera like one of those grade school double exposures, silly things, really but through that I learned the rudiments of lighting. Enough to have a foundation upon which to build. These days I’ve swapped my little pocket strobes for 800 watt studio strobes.

The odyssey of light continued on (still does) and I kept learning and creating and the work got better. We moved house in late 2018 and that winter I started playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Now, I could spend an entire blog post talking about that experience and how it transcended any and every notion of what a “video game” could be, but that would be an epic side tangent. The way it relates here is that at some point in the game you’re able to take Arthur (the main character) into some of the towns and do a variety of little side activities, and one of those is you can go into a portrait studio, dress him up however you want and make pictures of him in front of a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of poses. I spent so much time with that, buying all sorts of clothes and taking so many pictures. At one point the idea started to form in my head, what if I could do something like that in my portrait work? What if I got some old-timey backgrounds and figured out a way to get some costumes and I could dress people up the way I did Arthur. So that’s what 2019 became, the year of the “Classic Portrait Series”. Through some friends at the local theater, I was able to get costumes for most of the things I imagined, and whatever they didn’t have, serendipity found for me. It was wild, I wanted to do a portrait of Amanda with a crow on her shoulder and we actually found a picker who had a real stuffed crow. I wanted to do a classic cowgirl shoot and found an actual cowgirl who had just gotten hold of some old vintage western gear. It was like everything I wanted to do just kind of fell into place. The highlight will always be partnering with a local hair and makeup artist to help turn one of our local weather gals into Queen Elizabeth. Even though everything I did then was thoroughly planned and staged in regards to wardrobe and makeup etc. it still left some room for spontaneity on the day of the shoot. The Crow image is a good example. I wanted Amanda to hold the crow, as if it were perched on her wrist, but when we did that, there was no impact in the image at all (we also discovered that the crow’s talons irritated her skin something fierce). In the final image we ended up having my wife stand behind her and hold the crow on her shoulder, and in that frame the photograph came alive. There were many such examples and I’ll dig more into the specifics of that year and that body of work in a future blog post, but it was amazing and good fun and all the while I kept learning. Every portrait sitting was an opportunity to expand the knowledge and skill base a little more.

After a while, the staged theatricality of the Classic Portraits started to wear thin for me. It was fun, but thelogistics of planning costumes, hair, makeup and theme all began to drag and although I had some of the best times during that run of portraits, at some point I had the inkling that it was time to be done. It wasn't a single moment or a conscious “this is it” type of thing, more an overall feeling that I’d said what I needed to say in that area and it was time to move forward. After Covid, and probably partially because of Covid, I started to think about ways to create more authentic portrait work. So in the summer of 2021 I stopped making portraits entirely and I began to focus on still life and fine art work which coincided with my study of the old masters of photography. Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn and their ilk all became my teachers and their clouds and peppers and mountains and delphinium occupied my every thought, much as the portrait work had in the years prior. I mostly stopped working in color and focused solely on monochromatic images with emphasis on tonal range and depth. I photographed mushrooms and ferns and flowers and things that grew of the earth and I photographed clouds and landscapes and learned how to understand that feeling of creation that came over me sometimes, when I would just “feel” that an image needed to be made. My still life and artwork really took off in those years. All the while though, somewhere in the recesses of my mind I always knew I would return to portraiture when the time was right, and when I did, I would imbue it with the sensibilities I had honed in the time away. During this period the understanding came to me about why my earlier portrait work felt so inconsistent whenever client work and money was on the table. Through study I came to understand my own mechanisms for creating, and how I could really only make something true when the subject was one I felt strongly about. I couldn’t just make a compelling photograph of any client who paid me. For portraits, I had to be emotionally invested and if I wasn’t, the work suffered. And so because I had taught myself real estate photography, and was working regularly in that field, I would no longer need to rely on portrait work for income. So from then on, whenever it was that I returned to portraiture, I would do it my way and only work with people who moved me, people whose presence activated that feeling of creation that I had learned was essential to my process.

It wasn’t until summer of 2023 that I felt the urge to make portraits come back in earnest. There’s something glorious about the early morning, those moments between dreaming and waking have long been a fertile ground where ideas can flourish and grow, as long as I don’t forget them. And so it was on one early summer morning, I laid in bed thinking about what sort of portraits I could do in the small studio footprint that I had (my living room). Could I manage a 2 light setup? How about 3? And what would that look like? Those questions started the trickle of ideas which became a river which led me to my portrait series. I wanted to do something timeless, something that fell in line with the vision that had clarified over the year or two of study. A couple years before this, when I had really started to delve into still life and botanical work and the fine art style I had asked my neighbor to make me a table that I could use for such work. That table - which wasn’t even a table at all, just 5 boards glued together to give the look of a tabletop - became a centerpiece of the project and I began to put it all together in my mind. Richard Avedon had a way of interacting with is sitters that I really connected with. It wasn’t a formula and it wasn’t phony. He would use what he knew about them and during the sitting he would just talk, posing questions and “what-if” scenarios in order to elicit a true response. I wanted to do something like that. The black turtleneck was chosen because of the timeless look so that anyone looking at the images might well think they were photographed in the distant past, or last week. I knew I could count on my stable of models and friends who I had been working with over the years, so I reached out to whomever I thought would be a good fit and started working with no real clear goal or idea where it would go. Something that happened in the first sitting that would carry through them all was the addition of music. I have a moderately extensive record collection, and it became the custom to have my sitter go through the records and pick the music which would set the tone for the sitting. I did it as a way to break the ice, many of these people were my friends but some of them were people I had never met before or had not seen in a while and most of them had never been to my house, so the music selection was a way to get them comfortable. It became a unifying and crucial element. The goal of the whole thing was to capture a moment of truth, nothing staged, nothing forced or rehearsed and by having them choose the mood, I was showing them that this was a collaboration. A portrait artist by necessity has to rely on his subjects, without them the work doesn’t exist, but the subject relies on the artist too, and so by showing them early on that this would be a shared experience it helped open up the spaces for that moment of truth to emerge. Over the course of 9 months I had 33 people come through to take part in the series. There were moments of laughter and moments where the tears flowed freely and by the time the 33rd portrait was complete I really felt like I had accomplished something special that went far beyond that initial early morning idea. The work became defining. The last portrait was made on Leap Day 2024. At the time, I wasn't sure if I’d make any more of them. I even told a few people that “all the lights went out” after that one and I would be moving on. Time has made a fool and liar out of me though, because as we speak I’m planning the next round, to start in early 2026.

As for finding my subjects, well, it’s still the same as it’s always been. I pull from the world around me. Friends, clients, their kids, the barista at a coffee shop, the clerk at the grocery store, the old guy who played the dad in that play I saw that one time… I have no set style or formal or look that I’m after. I only know that I know it when I see it, and with some people it’s like an air raid siren in my head going “this person, this person, this person”. I no longer pull from the local modeling groups, preferring instead to find people out in the world who stand out to me in some way. These days when I’m out and about, especially in larger groups, I’m always looking at faces. Approaching people never gets easier though, and I’m very mindful of the optics involved when asking someone if I can make a portrait of them, especially women who are younger than me. I’ve learned to just show respect, acknowledge that this might sound odd at first, and show people that I am interested in them for artistic purposes and that there’s nothing sinister or nefarious in my aims. Not everyone is up for it, and that’s just part of the deal. I’ve recently had the idea to make a special business card just for the people I want to work with. After we’ve spoken in person, sometimes very briefly, I give them the card, and it has a unique QR code that takes them to a hidden page on this site where I go in depth on why I approached them and what my work is all about. Hopefully that level of commitment comes through.

So that’s my first decade in portraits in a nutshell, and I expect to expand upon all of that in future entries here. It might be a good time to head over and take a fresh look at the portrait galleries, now that you’ve read about it all. In both the color and monochrome galleries I made sure to include the year the photo was made in the title, so you might be able to sort of chart the journey, so to speak. But what’s the big takeaway? After all of that time and effort and learning, what does portraiture mean to me at this stage in my life? Only this - I look at portrait photography as a sacred act. The light that reflects off of my subject in the moment I press the shutter is gathered and kept on the photo sensor of my camera. That light will never shine again in the same way, that person will never again be who they were in that moment. More than anything though, I enjoy photography the most when I’m making a portrait of someone. The idea that I can communicate something of my inner world through another human’s face is something I’ll never tire of. There’s a real collaboration that exists between me and my subjects, the sharing of soul pieces (a bit of mine in the journey for a bit of theirs in the image) the search for that one little sliver of truth, it’s awesome, man. I say ”sliver” of truth because I truly don’t believe that one portrait could ever tell the whole truth about a person. The extremes of human feeling are too far apart, and no expression exists which covers it all. And so we must settle for a piece. The stuff of life can be found in the search for that piece.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and sticking with me here to the end. I expect I’ll have more to say on this subject in the future, especially as I start making work in The Portrait Series in the coming year, so be sure to come back again sometime.

-Cory