Artist Statement

Photographing people offers the viewer a range of different emotions and different perspectives. I have always been interested in photographing the emotions of people and the spontaneity of expression in people’s faces. So much can be revealed through the look on a person’s face and I like the power that can be captured through a photograph of a person. Annie Leibovitz is one of my favorite photographers of all time. I really enjoy all of her work and the varying shoots that she worked on. Through her connection with her subjects she was able to capture honest and real images of the people she was photographing. Her powerful images that sparked controversy and conversation are proof that her work created an impact that was recognizable and appreciated. Dorothea Lange is also an inspiration to me because her work captures so much feeling. She lived during the depression and her work captures the turmoil and emotion that existed during that period. Her photograph of the Migrant Mother is one of the most powerful images because of the feeling of desperation and sadness that is portrayed through the women’s eyes. Overall, I am very inspired by the work of all portrait photographers because there is something to learn and experience from every portrait photograph. 


I picked the theme of emotion because emotion is central to almost any picture. Also, I really just enjoy taking pictures of people and capturing them during natural or spontaneous moments. My goal was to portray some kind of emotion through every image that I have selected.

Pre-Production

My preparation before my photo shoot with Monica as my model involved brainstorming what emotions we wanted to portray and how we might go about portraying them. In the end, however, we found that we couldn’t force too much emotion. Most of the emotions pictured in this presentation came from honest feelings.

Production

            The production took awhile because we found it was a lot harder than expected to portray different emotions. We decided natural emotions were better for the presentation so we spent a lot of time talking and snapping pictures when natural emotions became easier to portray. There were a lot of pictures taken during production because it was difficult to capture a good shot that also contained a real feeling or emotion. Also, the camera was not fully charged so we had to take breaks to charge the camera, but these breaks offered us the time to really think about the pictures we had taken and how to improve them. The location of all the pictures is in the hallway of the dorms. We did this so that there is a sense of repetition and unity among all the pictures. We figured that a different location for every picture would just be a distracting element considering the whole point of the project was to simply capture raw emotion. This means that the background does not really matter so we figured a white tiled wall would be the simplest and least distracting background. The pictures were taken in the middle of the day, which offered us plenty of natural light from the window in the hallway. Lastly, the only equipment used was my digital Sony camera. 

Post-Production

            Looking back at the images now I am not only happy that Monica is a great model who can express emotions very well on her face, but I am also very satisfied with the emotions we were able to capture. Although I wish we had better acting abilities and could have captured a greater array of emotions, overall I think we did a good job and ended up with a lot of photographs to choose from. Our original idea changed from us photographing different subjects in different locations to just photographing each other. I like our shift in ideas, however, because different subjects could have distracted the viewer from the main theme of our project: emotion. Our project is not about different people it is supposed to be all about different emotions.  By keeping our subjects and location simple we were better able to convey the idea of emotion. To improve our work I think I would have liked to have been able to take some kind of acting class or been able to capture a raw emotion right as it was actually happening. This is a lot easier said than done. Most people do not go and grab their camera when their friend is crying or feeling depressed so capturing true emotion would have been very difficult although I wish I could have been able to do that. However, everyone portrays emotions on their faces at all times during the day so I think our project was successful in capturing the emotions that we could at the moment. Overall, I am satisfied with our project. I really enjoy portrait photography so this project of capturing emotion is not over yet for me.