A studio makes people behave. Put someone under lights with a paper backdrop and they stand the way they think they should stand: chin up, shoulders back, the smile they use for passports. Take them outside, let the wind do something unhelpful to their hair, and within ten minutes they forget the camera. This is the whole argument, but it deserves a few more paragraphs.
The studio problem
A studio is a room designed to remove everything except the person, and that is exactly what makes people nervous. There is nowhere to look and nothing to do with your hands. The light is perfect and the perfection is the problem: it flatters, and flattery is not the same as likeness.
Ten minutes of forgetting
Outdoors there is always something happening that is more interesting than the camera. A gull, a bus, a smell of chips. People react to the world and their faces move, and somewhere in that movement is the expression their friends would recognise. I am not looking for a good expression. I am looking for a true one, and true ones happen between the good ones.
What I actually do
I walk. We talk about anything except the photographs. I keep the camera in my hand rather than at my eye, so it is a thing I am carrying rather than a thing I am pointing. When the light and the face agree, I lift it, and mostly I lift it too late, which is fine. There will be another.
Light, in order of preference
- Open shade on a bright day: the sky is the softbox and it is free.
- The hour before dinner, with the sun behind the person and their face lit by everything else.
- A doorway, half in and half out, for the face that wants a little drama.
- A north-facing window, when it rains, which it does.
- Direct midday sun, never, unless the person asks for it and means it.
What you lose
Control. The background you wanted is behind a van. The cloud you were counting on moves. A portrait made outdoors is a collaboration with the weather, and the weather does not take direction. What you get back is a person who looks like a person, and a picture that could only have been made on that day, in that place, which is the only kind worth keeping.
Nobody remembers the backdrop. They remember the wind.
Mara, who has heard this speech before
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