People and photos
I’ve been posting a bunch of photos on facebook today, and it’s made me think about my growing interest in photographing people. I’ve always been more of a landscape photographer; I like going places, seeing things, and taking pictures of them. Lately, though, I’ve begun to value taking pictures of my friends (and as a lot of my friends can attest, I can make people very annoyed by always asking for photos).
Photos tell a lot about a person. It seems as though most people stop the analysis of any kind of casual portrait photo at “so THAT’S what s/he looks like” (or “whoa, s/he looks really good/hot/etc.”). What I’ve come to find, though, is that the real value in photographs of people lies beyond the first glance.
You can tell a lot about a person by his or her surroundings, whether it’s people, things, or places. First, there’s a lot of materialism in photographs. Clothing and makeup tells a lot, of course, about a person’s view of looking pristine (you can often tell a model – or someone who would want to be one – by how they wear casual clothing, and the amount of makeup they wear). While some spend an amazing amount of effort to always look “perfect”, others really just don’t care. Often, I find, it’s the people that don’t emphasize their looks that help create the most interesting – and beautiful – photographs.
Another tell-tale sign of personality is the average number of people in a group of pictures. Facebook is a really interesting place to study this; some people take the majority of photos as a single self-portrait. Others have a very large majority of pictures where they are surrounded by three, four, or ten of their friends. (You can also tell a lot about a person by seeing how they interact with their friends, even in the single shutter frames of a photo.)
I really could look at photographs of people all day. I could also talk about photographs of people all day. I should stop.
By the way -
That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.
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