Character, Writers, and Portrait Photography

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Today’s guest post is by author Jeff Shear (@Jeff_Shear).


Philip Roth died on May 22, and I am looking at Irving Penn’s famous portrait of him that appeared in a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine. The photo, shot in 1983, depicts Roth at age 50, a time when many say a writer’s gifts are fully ripened. Penn’s photos of other writers—Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers—are icons.

The Roth image is a character study of an author known for the characters he’d created—the sexually absorbed Alexander Portnoy, the tortured writer Nathan Zuckerman (who leads us through nine books), and Seymour “Swede” Levov, among them, the protagonist of Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral.

In many ways, a portrait photographer encounters the same great issue as fiction writers, chiefly, creating and revealing character. So how does does Irving Penn go about telling us the story of Philip Roth, limited by a fraction of time, an image in two dimensions, one background, and whatever hues he can create?

Penn lights Roth in black-and-white, not color, leaving nothing to distract from the author’s unhandsome hard-wrought good looks. He has Roth’s face tilted slightly upward and away into the distance, so that we don’t see him head on but posed in triumph, indomitable, his balding pate, black with curls from temple to temple. The hair looks like—and is meant to look like—nothing less than the laurels bestowed upon a conquerer. In lesser men, before a lesser lens than Penn’s, those same curls might frame the face of Bozo the Clown. Writer beware!

Almost always, Penn tells his stories through tight shots of the face. Roth is rarely pictured by any photographer when smiling. Instead, Penn recognizes Roth’s thin lips, so that they appear sealed, withholding some pent up message. What—rage? intellect? how it all ends? The large, nearly bulbous nose looks almost architectural, structured and bent to shape; it becomes a prow, a bowsprit. And then we notice, just barely, at the bottom edge of the photo, that Roth’s wearing a shirt, probably white; only the collar is visible, so that it could be a towel worn around the neck of a prize fighter fresh from the ring. Wouldn’t Norman Mailer be jealous? In Penn’s treatment of Mailer, Roth’s contemporary, the author’s hands are folded against the face and probably flipping us the bird, and if that isn’t the story of Norman Mailer, the portraitist got it wrong.

In part, character is in the eyes, and, most of all, how the eyes are used. Take the screen goddess of the forties and fifties, Lauren Bacall. In virtually every shot, she’s looking askance, the eyes peering off to one side, on the make, or checking over her shoulder. She’s chic and dangerous. In Penn’s image of Roth, the eyes look far off into the distance, trained on the next higher shelf.

For writers, eye color is an obsessive, almost compulsive, element in character description. I plead guilty. For certain I’ve read about every description possible of green “alluring” eyes. But Penn’s portraits ignore color. An image of the poet Patti Smith by Penn, shows her looking louche, bare shoulder, her eyes stoned and lost and not giving a damn.

It’s worth a note that it’s not just the shape of the eye that matters, or the pupillary distance, or the lashes. The better story emerges though the view taken by the subject. He or she is looking at something, and what the subject sees, or finds important, tells a story all by itself, maybe the whole story. Often, maybe too often, writers describe eyes narrowing, sparkling, or suddenly getting larger. Rarely do we see eyes described by their fixation. What the hell is the character so interested in seeing? How important to story is it to know what the character wants? Most often, someone wants what they’re looking at. Skip the the 50 shades of blue “sparkle.” Better to show the reader the character’s focus; what is it that most attracts their attention and reveals an element of their being?

It might be asked here what the great young portrait photographers of our era are doing. The answer is pretty much the same thing as portraitists like Penn, but more often with color. The great Annie Leibowitz of Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vogue fame, says that, in school, “I wasn’t taught anything about lighting, and I was only taught about black and white.” She learned color on her own. Yet, when she takes her portrait of the poet and song writer Patti Smith (as does Penn), color is incidental, barely there. Maybe she’s created a moody blue ambience instead of cold purity of black and white. Still, it’s Smith’s cold dead stare and the dark props surrounding her that says “horsemen pass by.”

Today, the portrait is still chiefly about the face, but even with the introduction of color, backgrounds often remain almost incidental. The talented photographer Sue Bryce demonstrates that background is less about information than capturing a “look.” Peter Hurley calls himself a “headshot photographer” and sometimes completely dispenses with backgrounds. Face predominates and serves as its own setting, which is why setting may get in the way of a headshot portrait. And has the depiction of character, the description of face and figure, changed over the decades? Hardly at all. It still must reveal the beating heart of the living breathing person, which is also the writer’s single greatest challenge.

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Barry Schwartz

As a professional photographer who only occasionally makes portraits – but is a full-time observer of people and photographs – Jeff’s take on portraiture is lovely. Penn’s taste and successful ability to communicate (one-and-the-same) never flagged from the very beginning of his career to the end, as I learned to my surprise at the recent career-spanning show at New York’s Met last year (thoroughly documented in the exhibit book). Thanks so much for this.

jeff

Thanks so much for your reply Barry. Somehow, black and white images convey character best for me. That’s not to take a penny away from the genius of color portraiture, as I pointed out in the case of Patty Smith. My preference may be that I’m from a different era, where halftones and angles tell a story of attitude, which I might have expanded on more in the essay.

Barry Schwartz

Just like line-drawing, black-and-white will always be here. So many reasons – including some of the ones you laid out in your piece. For a photo to show well as b&w, it has to be graphically clear and have a story to tell. Color can hide or accentuate flaws in composition or story, but there are so many variables as to what makes a good photo, there is no bright line for good, bad, or even mediocre images. There’s also intention, and that can be in the form of direction of an art director or photo editor as to what they need, as well as what the photographer wants or intends. Some faces simply look better without color, in fact, I find as a default, almost everyone can look better in b&w.

Putting aside the intangibles of what makes a great analog photo from a negative, one of the advantages for a digital photographer is the amount of information that can be present in a good file (a lot). It is possible to make a terrific b&w image from a color file that has a lot of information in it, in some cases surpassing what you can get from a piece of film. Some images, initially imagined as color, turn out to be unsatisfactory for one reason or another, and converting them to b&w can salvage the shot, even making mediocre images compelling, be they portraits, landscapes, architecture, any subject at all.

Barry Schwartz

Also forgot to mention that Penn himself converted color images to black-and-white on occasion.

Peter J Billard

Very enjoyable, Jeff. I like reading a non-photographer’s take on shooting portraits when it’s as well written as yours. Thank goodness there are so many available styles and flavors to photographing people, as there are varieties in restaurants, music, art, voice, vacation spots, entertainment, opinion, cars, authors, and writing. It’s my job to make people look good and show their intangible qualities of character, which is a function of the type of clients for whom I shoot. Other types of photographers often take a different tact: fashion shooters enhance and embellish; photojournalists seem to portray politicians in unflattering ways; street photogs sometimes show despair and hopelessness in their subjects; model and actor shooters show straight-on, minimal-to-no Photoshop; rock & roll photographers show wild performance energy; author photographers show a whole heck of different treatments. I like it all! Thanks for your piece.

jeff

Thank you, Peter. I tried to find portrait photographers for this item to talk about how they establish character through the lens. No luck. Shy? I’m interested in the interconnection among the arts as they portray “character.” In the 6/25 NYer, Vinson Cunningham writes of sports maven Stephen A. Smith, “His hairline sits ever farther back from his squirming eyebrows, and his shifting expanse of forehead signal emotions before they make their way out of his mouth.” There’s a portrait of Smith, by Eric Helgas, below the clever and accurate article title, “Figure of Speech.” It all works together—copy, art, and edit. Helgas and Cunningham complement each other. And I wonder, what was Helgas thinking as he did his job?

Barry Schwartz

Without any specific knowledge about Helgas, I can say with assurance that he was thinking about conversations he had with his photo editor when he got the assignment. Photo editors, like editors for writing, can have a profound effect on the work. Unlike writing, however, photographers can provide a very large group of variations for the editor to choose from and for art directors to work with.

If you’re looking for portrait photographers to speak with, I can help guide you to a variety of resources, and perhaps a photographer or two. I would imagine this piece will help, since it shows you are sympathetic to the process.

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Gabriel GORGI

I’m only familiar with Peter Hurley’s work, but I agree with you. A portrait (or the smaller sibling .. the headshot) will continue to be all about the face and the reaction, this is its reason of existence if you will.