Portraits

“My portraits are a lot more about me than they are about the people I photograph.”

Richard Avedon.

“In portrait photography you can not strip the surface to see the real nature of a person. The surface is all you’ve got. You work with what’s there – what’s waiting to be discovered.”

Richard Avedon in “Avedon at work. In the American West by Laura Wilson “.

“I am going to find what is permanent in this face. Truth comes with fatigue. He displays himself just as he is, just as he did not want to look.”
Irving Penn.

I feed myself photography. I eat pixels, since I photograph digitally.
And in the street photography, the portraits attract me a lot.

I fully agree with the statements of the above phrases selected from two of the greatest masters of portraits. The portraits we do say much more about ourselves than about who we photograph.

I feel that the pictures I make tell about what I feel about the human condition on the face of this planet. And, each one, carries with its pecularity. They mimic, for me, a lot of my feelings for the person portrayed, their day-to-day activities, their life in the city and the street where they live, for example.

The portraits I share in this post depict, reflect the great experiences and some life lessons I received from the people I photographed.

My portrait photographs are environmental, I mean, made with natural light, the one that exists in each case and in each place. It is, therefore, off of studios between four walls or in portable studios that are transported to the places where the photographs are made. They are really street portraits, hence the name of environmental portraits, even though it recognizes that in them, it is not possible to identify, in the background, elements that contextualize where these people were, or what they were doing.

In each case, a story pervades each of these portraits.
In almost all cases they are random, occasional, unexpected encounters in which the photo shoots had a high level of tension because they were the first encounter with people hitherto unknown.

But in all cases the photography session was consented, authorized, and a high level of cooperation of the people photographed were achieved. Since I have had some very successful experience of contacting people, the sessions of these photos – in which many of them lasted only a few minutes – became pleasant experiences for both the photographer and the people portrayed.

I hope you like these portraits.

Antonio MOZeto

***moZZine***