Dear recalcitrant portrait subject…
Do not bore me with your protestations. I have heard them all before. Yes I know Karl Lagerfeld photographed you recently and better, barely containing his joy behind those dark sunglasses and tight white collar. Ryan McGinley similarly found the pale of your flesh fetching as you tumbled out of your jeans in the soft desert night aglow with sparklers, a bitten peach spilling juice down your pimply chin.
And you D_____ , never do candids I understand, who would want to see your ample jowels mid-sentence frag-one eye drifting off to points unrelated to the other-
I agree wholeheartedly H____, posing for pictures is emphatically not art- i really don’t know what all those other artists might have been thinking, wasting their time like that when all along YOU had the answer-OH!-YOU are not comfortable, we must do whatever we can to make YOU comfortable, sedate even, we could go for tranquillized, I mean, tranquil- don’t worry, all that preparartion and equipment I brought with the intention of doing my very best, that will go unused in my back pocket, we will go with your best idea, I am sure after seeing yourself so, so many times and from so many angles, never from below of course, (you know who you are) that you really have exhausted all possibilities, thoroughly, and have calculated the best pictures come at an angle of 36 degrees with the north light in a month that contains an “r”.
And you are not interesting enough- we all see that now, something you suffered your whole life I expect, nobly, and I know you never look good in pictures, not a one, narcissism does do that to a person.
I concur, photography is the most cruel thing one human being can inflict upon another, perhaps second only to the indignities one might suffer in a foreign prison. I promise I will make this brief, your time is money isn’t it, not like my time which is spent like a found penny, and no, I don’t need to take so many just to get one-the true artist needs but one master stroke of the pen or brush, one fragile sheet of film, one hand coated glass plate sweated over mercury fumes by hand, with which to capture all that is so very
human,
famous,
noble,
beautiful,
glamourous,
witty,
urbane,
rebellious,
grisled or gamine about YOU.
Because this portrait is nothing if not about YOU, there is no one else in the room is there? That Mona Lisa really tells us a lot about Mona doesn’t it? I really don’t know why she agreed to that picture, definitely was dealing with some weight issues and depression, could this poor chap not come back at a more opportune moment, perhaps when I’d had a little more sun, these northern Italian winters are brutal on a woman’s skin after all.
I guess it is the paycheque, these Photographers all make a lot of money don’t they, another face in the rogues gallery, another payday, dining out as Jennifer Aniston likes to say, on my fair countenance.
Dear recalcitrant portrait subject, please indulge me.
Your humble servant,
Robert.
Thanks for a good laugh! I won’t ask just how therapeutic this was to write let alone post
I have no idea what you are talking about, but man, you sure talked about it well. Love the shot and the writing. Now off to photographs someone who isn’t really all that interested in being… hey… wait a minute.
Nice, Robert. Damn nice.
I want to hear the back story on this one! Or is it simply 20+/- years worth of them…?
pitch-perfect vitriol…a hungry man’s breakfast. keep up the greatness.