What Makes a Portrait Great?
Author of this post: Kevin Kelly | About Blog Authors »Jorg Colberg of Conscientious and Miguel Garcia-Guzman of Exposure Compensation asked a handful of prominent photographers, curators, editors and gallerists to select a portrait and describe what makes it great.
The Stewart Sisters, 7th Grade. Photographer: Judith Joy Ross.
The responses they received are both enlightening and ambiguous. Take for example these words from Timothy Archibald about the above portrait taken by Judith Joy Ross:
The girls are being photographed, communicating with the viewer, being self aware and being all of these things and more, nothing is very dramatic, nothing heavy handed, but the end result feels utterly profound. The result seems to be a picture of these girls, but then seems to be communicating something universal as well.
More images and all of the written responses can be found on Colberg’s site.
via kottke
February 7th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
A great picture is more about a person opinion. Its an art and not all eyes can see it.
February 17th, 2008 at 2:49 am
As a wedding activities planner, I’ve coordinated and evaluated literally thousands of wedding photos over the years. And perhaps the single most important principle in terms of sheer compositional quality is: Garbage in, garbage out.
In other words, a photo is only as good as the input parameters the photographer utilizes. Period.
This is even true despite all the digitial video editing software that exists now. It’s very difficult to clean up a poorly-shot, poorly-set up, poorly developed photo after the fact - no matter how state-of-the-art your editing software is.
As with all truly artistic endeavors, it’s the artist and her sensibilities that make the art good - not merely the tools, equipment and accessories she uses.
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