Starting Out with People and Place - People aware

At the start of this part of the course I am very excited about treading my toes into a part of photography I’ve had little practice with and exploring something that I was becoming more and more interested in anyway, namely photographing people.

   The two things that struck me most when studying portraits in magazines and books were the prominence of hands within the photographs and the emphasis on inviting poses that were created by them. I was surprised at the amount of portraits where hands were raised to their models faces to rest on them. This coupled with the variety of ways the hands were arranged complied with what the author of this course stated: the hands ‘tend to catch the eye in certain positions’. A couple of examples of this I found occurring were Clare Boothe Luce in Vanity Fair – August 1934 by Cecil Beaton and ‘A woman poses in holiday attire next to a basket of red peppers’, Asturias, Spain, 1931 by Gervais Cortellemont. With the portrait of Clare Boothe Luce by Cecil Beaton I thought the hand resting on her head leads the eye to where she is looking while the other hand leads the eye back up to her face as it catches the light. With the portrait by Gervais Courtellemont, the woman’s hands are arranged so they suggest a connection between the woman’s eyes and the basket of red peppers. This is because the form a loose line between her head and the basket of red peppers so that (I felt) the eye darts between them.