The Formal Portrait

According to Nadav Kander, portrait photography cannot capture the “soul,” “spirit,” or “essence” of persons. I tried to see if he was right ... and things got complicated.

It's true that photography is limited. People are 3-dimensional, living beings who exist in time. Portraits are essentially 2-dimensional arrangements of "surface" form. Persons are substantive, but images are formalistic. It's virtually impossible to know persons through their portraits alone, absent more in-depth acquaintance.

To emphasize the "formalist" aspects of portraiture, I carefully grafted various additional geometric elements onto a set of portraits I had taken. I sought to place further distance between viewers and the portrait subjects.

But ironically, in re-working the portraits like this, I found I was seeing *more* about the people I had photographed. Compared to the bare portraits, the “grafted” portraits - which were burdened with seemingly extraneous formal elements - actually came closer to conveying aspects of personal "essence”.

This was a pleasant surprise. Portraits can convey a great deal more! But how, exactly? So, my next project: how do we extract substance from surface form?