In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.
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.
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.
It's still a political statement to stand on stage as a person of color and be excellent. We still need those images to combat the narrative we're often fed - as someone innately inferior or inexorably linked with lack.
We live in a beauty-obsessed age and success sometimes appears to hinge solely on the presentation of an image that is acceptable to the press.
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.
I photograph people as I find them. But people have issues about how they look.
We're always bombarded with images from magazines of what looks cool and sexy.
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.