Sessions / Appearance Studies

Are photographic portraits, especially those created in a studio, the most abstract of all photographic images, the most compromised agents of reality? Is there still anyone who really believes that photographs as portraits reveal any truth about the persons depicted? Or, perhaps, theatricality, as inevitable part of every portrait, is natural state, is the truth? This is a series of studio portraits of young people in adolescence. Photography is part of their everyday life, more so than with any generation prior, yet the experience of being in a photographic studio is foreign to most. I was interested in their reaction to the space whose sole purpose of existence is image creation, the space where theatricality and ultimate masquerade take place. I photographed them with digital camera first and then with the 4x5 camera. I wanted to see how the appearance changes when subject faces these different tools, one contemporary, therefore familiar, and the other of the old-world, almost an anachronism.