Meet my two sisters and my mother. This is one of a few other portraits they asked for. The way people who see you have a camera ask you for a picture. Not just a picture, a good picture.
You suddenly might be inclined to explain to them just what a good picture means to you versus what it means to them. But then you realize what they want. They want to look pretty or good or handsome or cool. Positively. Most of the time you comply with only the bother of knowing that they'd like to see the picture right after you take it (oh! the digital age). But if it's someone you dislike, isn't it a bit funny to take a picture of them? I was going to do something like this once. Take pictures of people I had some tension with. I only have the remains of pictures I may have snapped at some point of them.
But the point I'm brushing is that even those who you dislike, and ask you for a picture with which you comply, you know just how to please in terms of the photograph. You might be gritting your teeth, but you know just how to get them off your back. With that good image of them.
Even children know it. The smile, the little pose. Kids posing like kids do. It's all very formulaic, and yet, there's different results every time. A reason why that snapshot of somebody could always be the same, and at the same time so dramatically different than all the other ones.
Nobody wants to be stolen away into a permanent thing in a bad light (yes I suppose it's a pun, enjoy.) There's a sort of standard portrait.
But does it mean it's not reality? Hardly.
It's more truthful than any portrait that might be taken with reality being forced into it, because when we as photographers try to fabricate as specific reality, we fabricate our reality more strongly than our subjects do. When our subjects tell us to show you their fantasy, we often get more insight into their realities. Which is a vague one, granted, and a general one as well, but you can eventually notice it.
The nervous twitch in my mother's lip. The high-cheek-lots-of-teeth-ARE-YOU-GETTING-THIS? smile of my sister Giannina (to the right) and the look-at-my-hair-look-at-my-hair-look-at-my-hair-look-at-my-hair-okay-look-at-me face of my sister Natalia.
So is the family portrait ever misleading? It could be, but it "always tells a secret" (Arbus).
Family Portraits?
AND a whole lot more. It's a fun thing to Google :P
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