Impulse

I have been asked to review the past sev­eral years of pho­to­graphic work and to choose 10 pho­tos to pub­lish in a book my pho­tog­ra­phy group is putting together. I had been hold­ing off as I’m not really inter­ested in a book, but today to give it a whirl. Choosing only 10 images from sev­eral years of work is a great exer­cise. It forces me to make a lot of deci­sions about what I really like most in my work. It also shows me how my tastes have changed — or stayed the same — over time. Finally, it’s an inter­est­ing Rorschach test — I never know what pat­terns will turn up.

What turned up this time is a whole lot of por­traits. I don’t think of myself as a por­trait pho­tog­ra­pher — I’ve hated posed pho­tos since I was a child. At 7 years old, I chas­tised my mother for tak­ing a posed pho­to­graph: “That’s not what peo­ple look like!!!”. I’ve always pre­ferred can­did shots of peo­ple, tak­ing them unawares, being them­selves. Looking again at the por­traits I picked today, none of them are posed. They’re all can­did shots I took in a moment when the sub­ject, still relaxed and being them­selves, paused to let me take their photo. A lit­tle gift from them to me.
Maybe that’s why I like these…