I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to the world... Every so often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.
It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.
It always surprises me how much my followers appreciate how candid my photos are - they may not have a particularly unique subject, but it's more about the light you shed on the subject than the subject itself.
I'm much more about the emotion that a photograph provokes out of you and less about how technically brilliant it is.
We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.
Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.
You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people.
Sometimes photographing people is like pulling teeth, trying to get some sort of personality.
There's a pressure to conform to particular images, and it feels a pretty exclusive pool of body image or facial image that is considered appealing. And in a way, that feels like pre-judging what an audience might actually want.
I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.