Why I Want To MAKE Your Portrait

I want to make a portrait of you. And notice I said make and not take. A lot of words describing photography use war and weaponry words ___ shoot, capture, point.

And Susan Sontag says photographs trace from the real, which is why they hold such power.

A photograph does captures a moment__it records our nowness.

And perhaps this is why photography opportunity to change the world and to open people’s hearts.  Just think of the image of the child being ripped from her mother that got millions of hearts opened, radicalized and activated this week.

I remember one photograph vividly, a portrait actually, made of an old man sitting in the bombed-out ruins of his home in Syria. He sits on his bed, next a record player. The image cracked my heart open__I felt a moment of union with his soul and with his sorrow. I understood the devastation Syria in feelings, not in my head.

And portrait photography can be especially awesome as it holds the ability to trace two souls connecting.  We think we are looking at the person being photographed.  We’re actually  looking at a meeting of two souls. Take the image on the cover or Patti Smith’s album Horses. We look at it and think we’re looking at Patti Smith. We’re really looking at Patti Smith”s soul combining with Mapplethorpe’s. 

I use this example because this idea of portraiture as a recording of two souls connecting became evidenced when I attended the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at MOCA last year. The exhibition overwhelmed, his work is amazing __giant, powerful, dark, human and humane are all words describing  my experience of it.

But the portion that enchanted me was a small wall of  photographs made of Robert himself. The collection of portraits were made friends and lovers throughout his life. What astounded me then__ and still astounds me__is that looking at each image, I felt a sense of what the relationship was like between the two. Some of them were playful. Others held qualities of a more quiet and serious nature. But they all showed what some term the transcendent function between __two souls meeting one another.

And transcendent function__I like seeing and experiencing that.

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