Blog Prompts #5, #6 and #7

#5 “I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.” ~Mary Ellen Mark

Back on the days when Photography first began, people believed that you could extract their souls through the camera. Of course, the mumbo jumbo behind this has a logical reason: Portraits can be a powerful tool to deliver a personal insight of the photographed. If used correctly, with a good frame and a great angle, it can deliver not only the feeling but even the real thinking that this person had.


#6 One of the things that I like about photography it's the fact that it can become a reflection of the reality we live in. I believe that the only way to alter digitally a photo portrait is when this reality is in fact, hurting somebody (ex: Car crash photographs on Newspapers or stuff similar to that). Other than that, the reality of the human body and mind is so beautiful, that I don't see why people would disregard it and wanted to minimize it throught the computer.

#7 Most of the portraits pictures I see are either on Facebook or in News over the internet, as well as trough my tumblr feed. Since I live pretty much 24/7 connected to the internet, it's easy for me to see at least 20 of these portrait pictures on my everyday life.

I believe there are substantial differences between all of them, and all of them are related to the fact of the representation. A portrait is the meaningful representation of somebody, using elements of the picture related to the portraited. We can see Facebook requires this picture in order to give you a personality, or a "face", to every word you say, and even if you decline submitting one picture, Facebook will provide you with a temporal anonimous picture in order for users to know who is the one in the other side of the computer.

Most of these portraits pictures are self taken, meaning, they are all were took by the owner of the account and uncously, the owner of the account "imprints" his personality over them: a social person will have a lot of party images and perhaps his profile pic will be that of a party, a serious person will have a standard portrait picture and a misterious person may have a black and white photo. All of those cues are for the user to realize who is the guy/girl the user is talking to.

Now when contrasted with Tumblr portraits: most of them are either from fashion photos, celebrities or art pictures. Most of them will be carefully crafted in order to create and convey a feeling or sensation. It's not about the subject any more than it's about the picture. There is this element of focus over one topic or feeling to explore throught that picture.