Karsh, and truth, in order

He is one of the most famous photographers in the world. Behind the camera he led what could be called an interesting life by anybody's standards. Going from being a refugee to hobnobbing with the famous while taking their portraits is not a typical career path.

I'd seen some of the portraits before, of course. The one of Churchill is famous, and it made his reputation.

Getting a good photo of a person doing something ranges from easy to difficult. People themselves are more or less photogenic. The activity might be more or less interesting. Getting to the right place at the right time with the right equipment takes planning and a bit of luck, especially with children. The outdoors light can be a crapshoot.

Get most of it right and we can see something about the person, their personality, how they do things, some of their life experience. Get all of it right, and something unexpected happens. We see the photo come to life, and we something meaningful. A truth, if you will.

Posed portraits are at once a bit simpler, and much more difficult. The time, place, and equipment are a matter of making and keeping an appointment. However, most people don't like having their photo taken at the best of times, and a posed portrait is the worst. There you are, you and the unforgiving camera. What do I do with my hands? Is this too much smile? Where do you want me to look? Is this my good side? What about my wrinkles, skin folds, warts, birthmarks? Props? Clothes?

(And yes, I was taking mental notes about poses, and lighting, and props)

If you're someone famous, you've probably got a publicist standing there, trying to make sure you are projecting the correct image for the latest project. Which if it isn't you, is enormously difficult. I think part of the problem for actors is they are chameleons, and even they don't really know who they are. How then to be yourself?

Karsh had the happy knack of getting people to relax, and knowing exactly when to press the shutter release. In many of his photos we can see, if not 'the' real person, we can see a real person. Something about the interplay of light and shadows creates a portrait. We can tell, or think we can tell something about that person, their mood, their emotions, their underlying personality.

It's said the camera never lies, and that itself is a lie. The camera lies all the time capturing a 2 dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional world. Often in portraits it's further reduced from colour to black and white. Then there's the development process, whether on film or with software, more lies. Then there's how it's displayed, is it nicely framed and properly lit with other such works? Displayed on a crappy monitor? Printed on the wrong paper? It's easy to be deceived by an image.

Oddly enough, we don't do much better with truth and lies face to face in real life. Gladwell explores some of this in a series of related essays in Talking to Strangers.

Perhaps the most interesting part for me was how the various American spy agencies were fooled, mainly by the Cubans, but also the Soviets. They were beyond chagrined to discover that all their agents in Cuba were double agents, feeding false information to America, and true American information back to Cuba.

These agencies were full of people trained to deal with deception, looking for spies, and they got fooled. One person one occasion you could understand, but it was many people, many occasions. What happened?

We generally expect people to tell the truth, or close enough. We think we know what that looks like, except there's enough exceptions to make it tricky. They've done tests, (some of them are fascinating) and what often trips us up is transparency. When someone's behaviour matches their story, it's easy. If someone looks nervous because they are nervous because they're lying and afraid the police officer is going to tase them to death if they tell the truth, that's easy.

But when someone has behaviours that in our culture are the signs of lying, even when they're not, they get into a world of trouble. Police often assume they're lying, even when the objective evidence says otherwise. That can get bad if you have the wrong colour skin.

And then there's the opposite. People who look and act trustworthy, even when they're lying. One famous example is Chamberlin's meetings with Hitler. We know from his later actions that Hitler was an evil madman, but how did Chamberlin get fooled? It wasn't just him.

Or Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi scheme king. He defrauded thousands of victims out of billions of dollars. Multiple SEC investigations didn't uncover the frauds. Why? Because he looked trustworthy.

The assumption of trust, that people are generally telling the truth, is one of the things that makes the economy go around. We put our credit card number into a computer and someone on the other side of the world ships us some stuff. Or, we used to hand our credit cards to the wait staff in a bar and they went away to run it through the machine, then brought back some paper for us to sign. I've written cheques for lots of money to go to investment firms to be invested on my behalf. We trust that the person we meet at a social occasion is who they say they are, and don't have any intentions worse than getting your pants off, which gets us to consent. This is a sticky wicket at the best of times, and gets worse when booze is involved.

All of which is very interesting reading, and a great start on my summer reading program.

Of the Day
Michelle
This photo session with Michelle was one of my few actual portrait sessions, and certainly the one I enjoyed the most. We had fun posing in the wonderful light in some great locations. In all of them we see some of her personality. These ones at the end of the evening were the ones where we were trying to project a specific image. There's lots of things to get right, and I was doing some experimenting trying different things. Michelle was patient and helpful throughout.

I've given you three, to show the subtle differences in lighting and mood. The last one is the one I liked best, but it's cropped square as opposed to my usual crops. It makes a difference. All of them are 'a' truth, and the trick is to select the right one. That must have been difficult for Karsh, going through the several photos he got (remember, he was dealing with a big bulky medium or large format camera and could only take a few photos in a session and they were likely all 'good') to get the one to publish. I've more to pick from, but then again, so much is wrong with mine that it would be easy for a pro to eliminate various candidates and be left (hopefully) with one.

If you want to go back and see the first photos from this session, go here and here. The expanded of the day section starts here.

In any case, this is the last of the Michelle photos of the day. Thank you so much Michelle!

Curtis and Celina, taking their supervision duties seriously.

Flowers

White Peony on June 2 now.

Driftwood