The Art and Psychology Behind Every Portrait
Why you don’t enjoy having your picture taken may be the exact reason you need to do so.
Photographer Yousuf Karsh made this photograph of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in December 1941. The terrors of World War II were consuming the world. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had ignited a new front in the global conflict. Nazi forces had defeated France and threatened to soon come for Great Britain. Given the circumstances, one might forgive Churchill for looking less than chipper.
Except the source of the steely gaze Karsh photographed that day wasn’t caused by the ever-present drumbeat of war but a more immediate transgression. Moments before clicking the camera’s shutter, Karsh had walked up to Churchill and suddenly plucked from his lips the cigar the prime minister had obstinately refused to stow. A move Churchill hadn’t anticipated, the scowl across his face was a fresh and genuine response to the insolence of Karsh’s action.
“By the time I had returned to my camera, he looked so belligerent, he could have devoured me,” Karsh would later recall of the incident.
It was a decisive moment that became an iconic portrait. More than staging Churchill at his most flattering, the photo reveals a man who would meet any adversity — from an upstart photographer to total annihilation at the hands of an invading army — with the same unflinching determination. It depicts more than a likeness of Churchill, it carries a presence. If you somehow knew nothing else of this storied leader, the image conveys something significant about him, despite lacking the explicit narrative detail.
Therein is the art of the portrait, a photograph at its best when not just of someone but about them.
Everyone can grasp the basics of the portrait. In fact, portraiture has become the most democratized form of photography by way of its modern iteration — the “selfie.” A self portrait used to be an indulgence for the rich and powerful, those with the means to hire an artist to create their likeness within a frame. Today, if you carry a smartphone, you already have facing you a camera ready to fire at a moment’s notice, a power further enhanced by just how much latitude you have to control the viewer’s perception. Nothing within the frame is recorded until you decide the moment is right.
While these types of photos can be considered portraits in the technical sense, they often fall short of the art form’s true potential. A selfie is very much about your vanity, a carefully crafted image that curates only what you want to gather and project out into the world. They are also spurred mostly by immediacy and because of this, may not tell a story that is ultimately relevant your grand narrative. It’s fine that you particularly like the way your hair or outfit look, have arrived at your vacation destination, or just met your favorite celebrity — exciting moments maybe, but these are minor details. After all, we are about more than how we look, where we’ve been, or who we know. Think of any eulogy for the dead you’ve ever heard, and consider just how little those aspects figure into the homage. True portraits, like eulogies, bypass the trivial, but they don’t do so without a fight.
It’s said that every portrait is a battle between the subject’s vanity and the photographer’s guile. For the sitter, a good portrait is one that can convincingly portray him or her as they wish to be seen, when the airs they cast are transferred believably into the photograph, creating a pretense that will be captured and unmoved for all time. The photographer, on the other hand, seeks truth. If that can be done while pleasing the subject — assuming the value of a photograph is nothing more than a commodity for such a purpose — all the better I suppose, but for the photographer who appreciates the craft and result as art, there is something primally different between viewing a good picture of someone and viewing a portrait that carries an undeniable and honest essence of that person. You don’t know it until you see it, but you are certain of it once you do.
We’ve heard stories of primitive people who once feared the camera, because they believed it was capturing their souls. Maybe it’s understandable why it would appear that way. If you’ve ever seen a photo of yourself in an unguarded moment, when you weren’t expecting anyone to be looking much less recording, your initial reaction is discomfort. You understand the camera didn’t physically steal anything from you; still, it’s as if something about you has been plucked from the fiber of your being and revealed to the world without your permission. If all the world’s a stage, this is an unsignaled cue, the deception behind the magic trick of your self image unmasked.
The camera in the hands of another is a formidable harbinger of the one fear we all inevitably face: self doubt. The space before the lens out of our control is a place of vulnerability, even for those who are used to performing in it. Somehow before the camera even our best clothing, superb makeup, expertly trimmed hair, the spoils of our accomplishments — things that would, in any other circumstance, be sufficient to bolster our self confidence — feel anemic. Our questions before the camera begin: What is it really seeing? What flaws is it showing? Will it show the person I want to believe I am? Momentum is a friend to the facades we build. Always in motion, lapses in our defense can be fleeting and therefore deniable once we attain the presence of mind to suppress them. A moment frozen in the frame, however, can be perused at length, analyzed with agonizing detail, and worse yet preserved for an eternity. The stillness is unnerving to anyone, who upon self-scrutiny wish only for themselves and others to move on.
Richard Avedon photographed then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1976, part of a bicentennial article for Rolling Stone. An architect of the war in Vietnam, which had ended disastrously the previous year, and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize many felt he hadn’t earned, Kissinger had but one request of Avedon: “Be kind to me.”
Avedon would later say he intended for this portrait to show “anger, ineptitude, strength, vanity, isolation.” Instead, Kissinger stands stiff and nervous, appearing like a man who perhaps didn’t look at himself much anymore for fear that the criticism and failures he no doubt held were all he would see staring back at him. Perhaps Avedon’s vision succeeded after all? Even the powerful can wither before the camera if they dance with demons too personal and damning.
Despite our best attempts to suppress them, whether for propriety or politeness, a human moment will eventually erupt from the seams of our manicured armor. They might be provoked by a sudden move or materialize in the midst of a protracted, uncomfortable silence. They may be significant or slight, awe-inspiring or awkward, perfunctory or precise. Yet, they tend to reveal what we attempt to hide, the parts of us that, in our opinion, haven’t been properly vetted for maximum social acceptance.
We each harbor a picture of ourselves in the mind’s eye, an image we seldom visually confirm but nevertheless carry with us throughout our lives. Maybe we aren’t necessarily comfortable with it, but we are familiar with it. When someone points a camera at us, we hesitate. The mechanical and objective lens will create a counterpoint image, one that we may recognize on the whole as ourselves, but with a dozen or so tiny nuances or imperfections we tend to forget as we let ego take hold. The camera can undo, in an instant, all pretenses of the id, which is why many of us hate having our pictures taken by others and prefer to simply do it ourselves.
One of the worst misconceptions of popular photography is that the only worthy subject is beauty. Beauty, an ill-defined thing in its own right, is not the goal. Beauty can and will be pulled from anything. Beauty is transitional, generational, cultural, temporal, and above all else subjective. If you recoil from your own portrait because you don’t believe it to be beautiful, take comfort in the notion there is no such thing as an authoritative judgment on beauty. The art of portraiture is the art of intrinsic storytelling — not of a moment, not of an asset, but a complete picture, as it were, of you. A good portrait in some sense, may not always tickle your fancy, but it can be affirming. The irony of it is while you might not recognize the person who appears in the frame, more often than not, the other people in your life will, and it should be a comfort in the end the only person you have fooled is yourself.
