The portrait is a popular subject and has been approached in many different ways throughout the history of photography. Consider the carefully controlled studio work of Cecil Beaton, the more informal work of Jane Bown or the candid work of Eve Arnold. Explore a range of approaches and develop a personal response.
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Cecil BeatonBeaton launched his career as a ‘society’ photographer in 1926 with an exhibition in London which won him an immediate contract with Vogue, where he worked for the next thirty years. His style was inspired by figures such as E.O. Hoppe, Edward Steichen and Baron de Meyer, the most successful magazine photographers of the 1910's and 1920's. Beaton’s fascination with glamour and high society prevailed throughout his life and in 1937 he became court photographer to the British Royal Family. He also became a successful stage and costume designer, most notably for 'My Fair Lady' and 'Gigi'.
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Jane BownCheck out this great interactive gallery of Bown's work.
Following her first professional assignment Bown developed her distinctive style. She bought an Olympus camera with an 85mm lens, and set it, invariably, at a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second with the aperture at f2.8. This combination of wide aperture on a close-up lens produced a very thin depth of field. So by focusing on her subject's head and, in particular, their eyes, she caught their faces in a way that isolated them, sharply, against hazy backgrounds. At the same time, she made sure the light caught her subject's eyes. Just look at those images: Margaret Thatcher, Richard Harris, Francis Bacon. Each personality is caught by a glittering eye. Decades later, she was still using her faithful Olympus because she was "supremely uninterested in photographic technology, accepting her camera's limitations as imposing a necessary discipline on her image-making," as Germaine Greer has observed. Most of her photographs were taken in sessions that lasted no more than 15 minutes. She had no props and turned up carrying only a shopping bag with her camera in it. Annie Leibovitz she wasn't. Even exposure meters were shunned. "I just looked at the light on the back of my hand and judged it that way." Thus Bown perfected minimalist photography: the same camera, the same lens, the same setting, but no flash or exposure meter. In this way she was left free to concentrate on those eyes. |
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Eve ArnoldIn 1948 she enrolled at the New School for Social Research in New York. Taught by the art director of Harper's Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch, she applied the set subject of a fashion show to document a catwalk, set up in a deconsecrated Harlem church. She was unusual not only in being a female photographer, but even more so in being a white woman, working in what was then widely referred to as a ghetto. The fashion show, too, was something else, devised extravagantly in deliberate defiance of the formal lines and stiff styles of the haute couture of the day. She continued working in Harlem for the next year and a half, as the fashion project grew into a unique documentation of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, but no one else seemed particularly interested. By this stage she had moved to Long Island, where she lived with her husband, Arnold Arnold, and their son, Frank. Wearied by press rejections in the US, her husband helpfully sent a selection of her prints to Picture Post in London.
It was Picture Post's publication of the story in 1951 that launched her career. The effects were immediate. She joined Magnum, becoming a full member in 1957, and covered such high-profile news stories as Republican conventions and the McCarthy hearings, as well as conducting a 10-year study of a founding family of Brookhaven Township, and photographing the then largely taboo subject of births. Arnold alternated between colour features on people's daily lives and glamorous silver screen portraits. She became more and more interested in cinema. Her portraits have the air of a caught shot, while in fact being the fruit of a long experience, a period of waiting while trust is built. They include Crawford wrestling with the "iron" girdle; Andy Warhol lifting weights astride a toilet; Dietrich from the legs up. |