LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
PHOTO DISTRICT NEWS
www.pdnonline.com
Volume XXXII Issue 2 February 2012
IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE TO TALK ABOUT PORTRAITURE
without mentioning how painful it is for most of us to have
our picture taken. This month, photographers renowned for
their environmental portraits describe the pleasure of collaborating with a subject eager to participate in a successful portrait, and the techniques they employ when working
with subjects who feel uneasy being scrutinized in front of
the camera. On the brink of her mid-career retrospective,
photographer Rineke Dijkstra, the master of probing portraiture, explains how she makes her empathetic portraits of individuals facing the
most self-conscious time of their lives: adolescence. The Kentucky-born documentary photographer Shelby Lee Adams notes that his own discomfort at being prodded and posed for family pictures as a child informs the collaborative way he has
photographed the people of Appalachia.
© brian bloom
In the introduction to his new book, excerpted in this issue (“Ode to Appalachia,”
page 26), Adams challenges photographers who enter the lives of unfamiliar people
to explore further and get beyond clichés and stereotypes. While we were working with Adams, I was reading the new memoir by the photographer, educator,
photo agency founder and media critic Shahidul Alam (reviewed in “Our Picks of
the Month,” page 24). Alam’s work has been inspired by his desire to foster a more
complex view of his native Bangladesh than the one depicted in the West, and to
empower indigenous journalists who have knowledge of their local languages and
customs to deliver their perspectives to the wider world. Alam observed the Western
journalists, who had long ignored his country’s democracy movement, descend on
his country when a cyclone struck in 1991. They produced “the same piteous imagery” that distant photo editors wanted and expected. The longstanding criticism of
the Western media’s depiction of the developing world has inspired some greater
sensitivity about promoting images of poverty and victimization. In describing his
subjects’ discomfort with the media, however, Adams reminds us that much work
remains to be done when it comes to sensitively portraying the poor and isolated
within our own country.
Adams’s challenge to photographers takes on extra urgency as American communities slide from prosperity to poverty, and residents bristle at the media scrutiny of their neighborhoods’ foreclosed homes and shuttered stores. Adams notes
that it’s important to advocate on behalf of issues without reducing the complexity
of individuals’ lives to mere symbols, or depicting them as nothing more than victims. Portrait photographers interviewed in this issue say that in striving to create
probing, uninhibited and sympathetic portraits, they have discovered commonali-ties among people familiar and unfamiliar. That discovery is a process, and it is ultimately what distinguishes good portraits from those that go unnoticed, and just
make subjects squirm.
Regular Contributors Edgar Allen Beem,
Kristina Feliciano, Jay Mallin, Eric Newman,
Theano Nikitas
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, NIELSEN EXPOSITIONS
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