The Gesture: Michelle Sank

I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting a bit tired of what could be called the Alec Soth school of portraiture (sit up straight and look mournfully into the camera). There seems to be a gesture preferred by art-photographers-cum-portraitists which because of its proliferation has ceased to endow great meaning and now is just plain annoying.

That's why it's so refreshing to see artists like the English photographer Michelle Sank exploring other ways of using gestures in environmental portraits. These small reproductions don't do them justice, but the gestures seem more alive, as though they took that form for only 1/250th of a second and not for an eternity. The effect is totally different.

Michelle Sank, from The Submerged

Michelle Sank, from The Submerged

Michelle Sank, from The Submerged

Michelle Sank, from The Submerged

Michelle Sank, from The Submerged

Michelle Sank, from The Submerged

I'd love to hear some of the photographer-subject conversations that occurred before these pictures were made. Some of her subjects look so relaxed it's as if she had just shot them with a tranquilizer dart.

Do yourself a favour and see more of Michelle Sank's work here.

The Gesture: Walker Evans' Businessmen

The gesture in portraiture can be subtle or more obvious. In a commercial or editorial setting, for example, subtlety may not necessarily be prized. The viewer is led, like a horse to water, to the required reading (whether she drinks is another matter).

During Walker Evans' 20 years (1945-65) as staff photographer at Fortune, he produced some remarkable work whose artistic value often transcended his initial briefs. (For a great online catalogue of this work, take a look here).

These portraits of businessmen, made in 1952 in lovely large-format colour, are more in compliance with the accepted conventions of editorial portraiture. In keeping with his previous work, however, they show a master photographer finely attuned to the importance of the gesture in the making of meaning.

Walker Evans, Towe of American Cynamid, Fortune, June 1952

Walker Evans, subject unknown, Fortune, December 1952

Walker Evans, Cisler of Detroit Edison, Fortune, March 1952

Walker Evans, South Pacific's Russell, Fortune, April 1952

Walker Evans, subject unknown, Fortune, September 1952

Interestingly, Evans had strong views on portraiture which suggest that he probably would not have enjoyed making these kinds of pictures. In a wide-ranging interview given in 1971, he spells this out:

PAUL CUMMINGS: You’re not really interested in photographing people in the way you are buildings or something, are you? Even in a Chicago street group it seems more of a pattern than –

WALKER EVANS: Well, I’m not interested in people in the portrait sense, in the individual sense. I’m interested in people as part of the pictures and as themselves but anonymous. I really disapprove of photographing celebrities or known beauties. I do it every once in a while but I think it’s – I can’t quite put my finger on it but I don’t feel right doing that.

He also has a tremendously entertaining dig at Yousuf Karsh and Henri Cartier-Bresson in the next breath. Check out the interview if you want to get a sense of the man as myth, late in his life.

The Gesture: Five Cartes de Visite

I have been thinking lately about the elements of successful portraiture in an art photography context. One of the most important elements I think is what we might call the gesture - the tilt of a head, the focusing of the eyes, the placement of the lips, posture, the implication of movement, and so on. These give the viewer the means to interpret the image.

What makes the portraits of Thomas Ruff (Google image search "thomas ruff" portrait to see some of these), whose name has come up a few times in class recently, so compelling is exactly the absence of the gesture in the photograph. This makes the job of reading the portraits - as representations of particular human subjects - very difficult. I won't go into the implications of Ruff's work here, but I thought I would instead show some examples of the gesture in action.

First, a selection of lovely cartes de visite I found recently, in which the sitters' heads are floating in an expansive empty frame.

Carte de Visite, n.d. (Photographer Unknown)

Carte de Visite, n.d.
J.S. Mayer, Photographer, 349 Canal Street, N.Y.

Carte de Visite, n.d.
E. Couchman, Photographer, No 45 South Pearl Street, Albany, N.Y.

Carte de Visite, n.d.
J.H. Abbott, No. 480 Broadway, Albany, N.Y.

Carte de Visite, n.d.
Mills & Son, Photographers, Penn Yan, N.Y.

What's great about images that have floated completely free of their makers and original owners like these is that we are unencumbered in our readings of them. Left with their facial gestures, isolated from the rest of their bodies, we can imagine as much, or as little, as we please.