How I learnt to make more Meaningful Portraits

I think we all struggled with the idea of meaning in our work whether you take photographs or write poems or paint paintings or make films at some point you're going to get to the stage in your journey where you ask yourself what am I doing this for what am I trying to say with this I think this is trajectory where we learn anything new and I think right at the start what a lot of us do is we dive in the deep in and we teach ourselves as many tricks and techniques as we possibly can because they feel like quick wins in our progress I remember when I started out as a photographer I tried to teach myself lots of fancy tricks lots of fancy lighting techniques or or how to do a Bren eyes a stitch because I thought that if I put those techniques into my images and other people couldn't do them when I loaded those images on sites like Flickr or 500px at the time they get good ratings and lots of good comments and I'd feel like a good photographer but even back then when I was filling my photography with lots of clever little tricks I had the suspicion that maybe I was substituting flair for substance because when I looked at the great photographers and the most famous of their images that have stood the test of time so I know about them today usually they were taken with the simplest of techniques possible so if it wasn't the clever tricks that means I know about those images what was it and it seems clear to me there was nothing to do with how they took it and it was to do with what they were telling me with the images they take and I think for a lot of us it takes us too long to start asking that question after we've learned all those techniques to start saying to ourselves what do I want to say with my work so in this video I want to tell you a story and it's one you've seen unfolding in pieces on this channel but I want to give you the behind-the-scenes of what's been going on so you can put all the pieces together and it's the story of how I'm learning to take a more meaningful portrait and I hope this video doesn't just apply to photographers but anyone who makes anything and it will get you asking yourself questions about why you make the work you do and what you really want to say portrait photography has always been a first love for me within all the sorts of photography that I've tried and I think it's something to do with loving the challenge of trying to capture an honest moment with somebody trying to get a snapshot of their personality waiting for that little in the armor where they reveal who they really are somehow so you can capture it in an image I said as much in this video I made back in July 2016 I heard a quote once and I can't for the life of me remember where it's from but it says something like every portrait is a war between the sitter's vanity and the photographer's guile that your subject is going to want to make sure that you captured the persona that they want you and the rest of the world to see but you as the photographer have to be clever and aware and sneaky enough to catch the in the armor that reveals the real them and capture that in a photograph it's always interesting that at the end of a session I'll pull the images up on the screen in light romans to be scrolling through together and choosing which of the images you know that I'm going to go away and edit for them and the one that is the most them is they'll have an interesting reaction to I've found they'll they'll be drawn to it but also quite scared of it so they're like all that one oh but I'm not sure other ones without yes that's brilliant I know that's probably not the one that I'm going to love at the end of the day because that's the one where they look exactly the way that they want to and I've got to talk them into the one that looks really like them but every single time if I manage to talk them into taking that shot that feels the most like them that felt the most unguarded it's always the one that gets the best response when they post it on a line from friends and family and people who know the most when I moved back to the UK in 2012 I decided that I really wanted to focus on my portrait photography I wanted to build my skills and create a decent portfolio for myself and so I did what a lot of people do I jumped on websites like model mayhem and purple port and I offered TFP shoots and TFP just stands for time for print or time for photos in the digital era and it just describes an exchange between models and actors and then photographers on the other side and I will work for free on the day and they will come and work for free on the day and there whatever images we create together we both get to use in our respective portfolios and it's a great way to learn if you're just starting out I did this for a few years and I started to build a decent-sized portfolio for myself but to be very honest with you at the time of making that video I was starting to get quite bored when I looked at my own work and let me say that it's not that the people I was shooting weren't interesting people because they absolutely were but I think when you work in a particular pool of models and actors you start to get the same sorts of poses and facial expressions and my work didn't have enough variety for me I wanted to go out and shoot people who had stories that were very different from my own I think the simple truth was that my portfolio ultimately didn't represent the sort of work that I ultimately wanted to end up doing I remember feeling pretty frustrated at the time and not being sure how to fix this problem and get more variety in my work so what I did is I started to go through a look at the work my heroes produced and work out what it was that drew me to their images in the first place and this is a clip from a video I made a few months later in October of 2016 who are your heroes and what photography did they do what photography when you see it online just makes your heart ache and makes you wish you could be doing that what's the stuff that really speaks to you because when you put it all in front of you you might find the answer staring you back in the face this is some of the photographer's work that I love [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so when I take a look at that it's so obvious I love people photography but I also love narrative photography something with a story something that's gritty and earn being real it's a terrible time to want to do this gone of the year of the career National Geographic photographers most publications are crowdsourcing images from all over the world now are not investing in single photographers to do this but that doesn't mean that this can't be a direction for me so what now I think it's important to remember this is a long-term goal this isn't something that happens overnight I'm not going to be sitting at home on a weekend watching Netflix if someone comes knocks on my door says hey we just want to give you money to shoot what you love I'm gonna have to build this over time start by making a mood board put together the photography that you love and see if there's a thread that runs through it and then keep it somewhere that you can access it look at it regularly build more images into it and put that in front of you as inspiration for the direction that you want to go then you've got to get out there on your own time and your own time you've got to go out and shoot the work that you love build that portfolio online of the work you want to go after and show the rest of the world what you can offer in that space no one's gonna hire you unless they see you can do it first it was really this reverse engineering of my hero's work that helped me to unlock the next stage in my development because it was obvious as I looked at my work if if it felt Samian lack variety perhaps the answer was a radical change of context maybe what I needed to do was to put myself in a plane to fly to another part of the world and find people with very different stories of my own and attempt to take compelling portraits with them so a march of 2017 I flew out to Namibia which is a country that's always had a very special place in my heart when I lived in southern Africa I visited the country many times and fell in love pretty much from day one so for me it was an obvious choice here's a clip from a video I made when I got back from that trip in April of 2017 I put out a video a few months ago looking at how we direct our photography careers and I said that I looked at my own that the images that I'm drawn to the other photographers create and it's invariably people photography but people photography where the portrait subjects are from different cultures different contexts and different stories than my own and I also said that there's no ways people are gonna come knocking on my door just to hire me for that kind of work that I need to go out on my own time my own money and prove that I can do this and that I love to do this so that's why I'm traveling up to the tribal lands of the Himba you can watch the whole video for yourself here on this channel but let me give you some behind the scenes context in terms of how I went about getting these images because I think it's important I got hold of that village ahead of time and I had arranged a fix-it from within the village because she spoke English and I asked her how I should go about getting these images what was the right way to do that she advised me to stay in a campsite nearby which I did and she came and fetched me two nights in a row at five o'clock and I would come and spend around an hour in the village taking images I was very aware and I talked about this in the original video that taking images like this if people were viewing them later and feeding unkind they could just accuse me of some sort of photographic colonialism or worse than that that the people in the village would feel taken advantage of that I was just there to take stuff from them and give nothing back so on top of making sure I left a financial donation for the village the approach that I took was to ask tango to go around the village when I got there and explained that I was there to take photographs if they would like them and that I was going to print those images out and send them back to the village which I did so what I did was is I set up on the side of the village and tango went around and told people that I was there and if they would like photos they would come across to me I didn't get anyone's face I didn't ask photographs directly or just start taking photographs they came to me as volunteers and I took images and I get asked a lot why there are no men in the photographs that I took and that's because there were a few men there not many but none of them were interested in volunteering it's not something they wanted and there was no ways that I was going to push something else I don't talk about in that original video is that there was a unique challenge on this shoot and that people would come over I'd line the shot up I take the shot and then they'd just walk away after that one shot because there's no cultural understanding in that village of what it takes to do a portrait shoot I said I'd take a photograph I took it so they just assumed I'd done and probably rightly so and I didn't want to explain to them what a portrait shoot was through a translator every time and make them stand there and make them feel at all uncomfortable so instead I took that on as a challenge for the day I'm gonna have to get this shot first time every time no second chances another thing that happened was while I was taking photographs with the women the kids were all kind of hanging around in groups and watching really interested they were especially fascinated by my light that was away but anytime they got too close to us taking photograph the women would chase them off when I was done taking photographs with the women I asked tango do you think the kids would like photographs as well and she said absolutely and the parents would love to get photographs sent back of their children so they could put them up on the wall she said the women had only been chasing them away because they were worried that they were bothering us and so she shouted something out in OT Himba which is their language and kids just came screaming in from everywhere in seconds I had this group of 30 40 kids in front of me pulling each other around and screaming and wanting their photographs and I had to kind of separate them out and explain one one one so one at a time they kind of come in and stand and I take a photograph and after every photograph I showed them on the back of my screen their image and it sort of became the game somewhere along the way that as soon as they saw their face they take the camera at the back and they hit the screen bow like this and then they'd laugh at giggle and run away so I take the photograph showed the back of the screen they giggle and they hit this and run off and by the time I'd finished my camera taking quite a few knocks and was just covered in red dust one of the things which stood out about these images for me though was the fact that even though I had only one shot only one chance to get an image with most people it was all I needed there was no need to warm up with a camera and there was none of that awkward trying to find the sexy pose which many subjects do the Himba I spent time with had an unabashed openness they just stepped up to the camera and gave me the most honest open stare and connection reviewing these images in my tent that night it made me want more for my photography than the more modely posing I've been doing up until now not that there's anything wrong with that but I wanted more of this openness no matter who I was shooting with skip forward a few months now and I'm back in London I've got these images and I want to make some beautiful prints of them so I've got hold of genesis imaging who are one of the best print houses in london they print lots of them magnum photographers and i went down there and i made a video with them as well about printing these images and the importance of printing your images in general here's a clip from that video from June 2017 I think the biggest surprise has been how forgiving printing is when you look at something on a computer that you can get very very stuck on the screen and zooming in at 400% on Photoshop and seeing that the imperfections as you go and I had this fear that you know if I print these big then those imperfections they will be even more obvious and people are going to see the mistakes that I've made but actually something about something about it because you've looked at it so close on the screen at the start actually you've already done the word the detail work so you've covered up the mistakes that you think you're going to make and you've you've ironed out the creases and they're by the time it gets to this stage and you've actually put it on something physical it just kind of snaps into focus almost there's also something about having it as a physical item you know because most of our work just exists online in the digital world and you know it's pixels it's on the internet it's not a physical thing you can touch and you know I'm not pretentious enough to go around calling the photography work I do you know odd but but that you can understand that when you print on something like this and you you actually take the time to do it properly and you you come to people who know what they're doing that once it is a physical thing then you go well you know I did fly across the world to get this shot and I did you know driving to the desert and find these people and have to you know deal with sweltering heat and try and get shots and difficult situations come back editor was up and when it actually comes through this final stage where it's a physical thing in your hand that actually exists there is something about it that you might dare to call art it's definitely been an eye-opening experience that day was pivotal for me because of something that happened off camera while I was standing there with the guy who was printing the images for me and this is a guy who really knows his stuff I mean he sees the best photography in the world watching these images come out I had a rare moment I think of insecurity where I was kind of proud of these images but I wanted someone who sort of knew his stuff to sort of say as much as well and I don't usually ask people what they think about my work but I thought here's a guy who knows what he's talking about so I said to him what do you think of these and his response was this he said these are technically good images of very interesting looking people and I don't care about them at all now he didn't say it unkindly I know that sounds unkind but I knew immediately what he meant and it spun me straightaway into questioning am i leaning on technique am i leaning on the fact that these are very interesting people because for some reason there's something missing in the middle of these images and this guy just doesn't connect to them at all he went on to explain a bit he said he believes you can feel when a photographer has a deep connection with the subject matter that they're photographing and he says there's nothing wrong with taking an aesthetically pleasing image or a solid portrait of really interesting people that's absolutely fine to do but photography hits a new level of depth when you can feel the photographer is invested in cares about the subject matter and that it's part of their own story somehow that's when photography really sings and of course when I looked at the image as I take and I knew he was a hundred percent right now let me just say I'm not ashamed of these images at all I love them they hold a special place in my heart they sit in my portfolio on my website they hang on the wall in my house but his words that day made me realize that there was deeper to dig if I was willing to go there and not just settle on the compliments that everyone was giving me for these images and go well I'm done this is me I'll just do this forever because I'm getting compliments if I was willing to mine a little bit deeper there was more I could get out of my photography a more meaning I could put into my work and let me say as well that I'm not sorry I went on that trip it was such an essential part of my journey I was stagnating and changing my context radically was exactly what I needed to do and that trip and those images will always hold a special place in my heart for what they represent as a stage in my journey so putting it as simply as I can I realized that the next stage in my growth I would need to go and take portraits which had a deep personal connection for me and my story so I bought a plane ticket back to South Africa in December of 2017 so six months after I printed those portraits with the Himba and I decided that what I do was travel round and visit three men who mean a great deal to me I lived in South Africa for almost 20 years and these were men who stepped in the gap as mentors at different stages of my journey and what I was going to do was just take very simple portraits of these people who meant a great deal to me personally here's a clip from a video I made about that trip I grew up without a father my left home when I was about three years old and for anyone who's gone through that sort of thing you'll know what a life shattering world-changing event that is and I was too young to remember it very well or maybe I blocked some of it out but from all accounts at that age my dad was my absolute hero and him leaving changed me forever probably on some level I remember I was sent off to boarding school for primary school and my teachers would write letters home saying is your son okay because we're really struggling to get him involved with anything he seems very withdrawn in general and he just seems quite rudderless like he doesn't really know what he wants or where he's going and I do remember that I had issues with authority at that age I didn't know how to speak to older men and maybe the reason for that is obvious especially looking back now and I struggled to trust anybody I just assumed anyone I got close to would probably end up leaving as well becoming a teenager was even more tricky because that's the point where you start to navigate becoming a man and if you're doing that on your own without that guidance you'll know what a messy and confusing process that can be I remember one specific day and again I was at boarding school at high school and I was standing in the bathrooms and I bought my first razor and shaving cream because it was time to start shaving I could tell but I had no idea really how to do it do you go up do you go left right to go down do you how do you do this thing and I realized I've missed out on that experience which a lot of guys have with their dads where they watch him shave or he pulls them up onto the sink and shows them how and I didn't really know so I was trying to serve to ously sort of copy the the guys who were shaving in the in the sinks next to me and work out how to do this thing and hopefully not get caught copying them because that would have led to a great deal of teasing and also not do it wrong because that would have been just as embarrassing and as sad as that is and as unfortunate as that is having to work all that stuff out you know how to talk to girls like what is a credit card all this stuff that you might take for granted that someone told you that I didn't have anyone to tell me at the time I was very fortunate in this regard that there were a series of men through my life who through my teenage years and my 20s saw a guy struggling to become a man and to navigate that and who stood in the gap and decided that even though I wasn't their son they were going to show me and help me and be generous with their time and their knowledge and their wisdom to help me get to that next stage I'm back in South Africa at the moment and I thought on this trip I'd take some time to honor some of these men on that trip I traveled 1,600 kilometres from Cape Town to Graham's town to Durban and sat with these men who mean a great deal to me three men who have been mentors and father figures to me at those points in my life where I desperately needed it and the experience of those shoots was unlike anything I'd had up to that point I mean I knew these people well so when I arrived at their houses we just spoke for a couple of hours because we wanted to catch up and all that talking sort of put us in a different space when we got around to shooting and obviously I'd emailed them ahead of time and explained what I wanted to do and it's some sort of natural break point in the conversation I'd say hey if you got a space I can just set some stuff up and I kept talking while we were setting up and just got them to sit down and then started taking photographs and there was no break in the conversation we just spoke and chatted the whole time you'll see if you watch the video that I use a very simple setup just a pop-up black backdrop I had a 50mm lens on the camera on one light just kind of placed in a rembrandt position because I didn't want what was impressive about these images to be anything to do with techniques or tricks and so I stripped it right down to its bare bones and took the simplest images I possibly could and I wanted to challenge myself that hopefully in the final images that I presented to the world that some people at least could feel that I had a connection with these people and I deeply love these men who have been there for me along my journey and so we talked and laughed and reminisced and it was just the easiest shooting experience of my life while we were talking I just waited for natural breakpoints and go that's great just hold that and I just take a shot and then we carry on talking straight away and after no more than 10 minutes on any of those occasions and a maximum of maybe 30 photographs that I took I'd start packing up and we keep talking and and it just flowed in and out it needed to be such a short shooting time because I knew I had it and we were done and I will always hold those shoots fondly in my memory I worry about sounding to worry about things like this because I know how deeply subjective art is but I think you can feel more of a connection to these images and me as a photographer even though my subjects here aren't as obviously striking as the himbo are as human beings I think they're stronger images because of my story with them and this is feedback I've had on these portraits from many others both who know the story behind and those who don't in this case I think it's because I love these people and maybe you can pick that up when you look at these portraits I needed a dad and in small ways that's who these men were to me even though it wasn't their job it was pure undeserved favor on their part and that's why their portraits hang behind me when I do videos like this because I like the symbolism of me talking to you but only being able to do so because of the influence of these men on the man I am today I hope you hear me well here this is my personal story copying and pasting my moves to find meaning in your own work might be a mistake if you're a fashion photographer for example moving away from modeling and posing is not the right choice for you you're gonna find other ways to build meaning into your work there's lots of different paths and it's all legitimate but just listen to those questions when they start to surface when you start to get dissatisfied with your own work you need to change something and for me the overly post stuff was starting to get semi and boring and so I knew I needed to change something to change my context and then to strip things down and find personal connections to take portraits which for me had more meaning and it's also important to say that you don't need to reject those previous stages or look down on them they're all part of your journey I borrow a phrase from Ken will but who says transcend and include which just means as you keep transcending and moving beyond the stage keep including what you learnt from those stages and take it along with you and own it all as part of your journey and never feel like you're done keep moving I for one feel like I'm just getting started so in my case I take all the technical stuff I learnt at the beginning while I was shooting models and actors and I also take my willingness to be brave and step outside my context and what I learned about shooting with incredibly open human beings with the Himba and I also take my understanding now that it's about connection my connection to a story and my connection to the images that I'm taking and I roll them all in together and I transcend and move to the next stage taking all that stuff with me I'm moving forward doesn't mean never shooting that stuff from those previous stages because I enjoy it all I'll still do headshots with actors I still do very technically lit shoots with models because it's a great challenge I'll still travel and I'll do portraits with people from other cultures and other stories because I find it credibly rich and invigorating and I will still look for those portraits I can take with people I have deeper connections to because it's all good stuff but the next bigger portrait project I have planned will require everything I've learned up to this point and some new stuff as well because I want to keep pushing myself I don't want to rely on just the techniques that I know I want to keep finding new ways to inject more meaning into what I'm doing and keep growing as a photographer so no matter what you make if you're hitting that point in your journey when you're starting to get tired of all the techniques and even though you've learnt a ton of them you realize that there's something still missing from the middle of your work it's time to start asking yourself the tough questions what stories do you want to tell what do you want to point these techniques at what do you really want to say it's going to take self-awareness you're going to need to be honest with yourself when you can feel your work start to stagnate and then have the courage to just flip the tables over and try something totally new learn to listen to criticism when it comes from informed and constructive people like it did for me that day in the print shop and if you can get beyond that initial sting we all feel when criticized they'll be gold to be mined in there for your journey don't reject previous stages learn to transcend and include everything you're learning as you move along and see the whole thing as a progression towards you building more meaning into your work and be kind to yourself I'm 15 years in and I'm not understanding it when I say I feel like I'm just getting started it takes time if it's worth it it should take time good luck [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sean Tucker

Views: 92,829

Keywords: meaning, art, why do we create, creating with purpose, art and storytelling, storytelling, portraits, portrait photography, tfp shoots, model photography, headshot photography, himba, namibia, mentors, portraits and story, constructive criticism, what should i make, finding meaning, meaning in your work, portrait portfolio, becoming a portrait photographer

Id: ep-cicuDCJc

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020