i got some studio lights over the weekend for a product shoot i had to do and it was a great excuse to start a project i’ve been wanting to do for a while. i’ve always been interested in people’s faces and emotions and what people project versus what they are really thinking/feeling. i’ve been studying up on richard avedon lately and his work speaks to me and amazes me. it seems so simple on the surface – just a subject and a white background, but if you look at the photos and really look at the people in them, there are a hundred stories and experiences on the faces. they fascinate me.
so i bribed the kids after school yesterday with some candy if they’d sit for me. i wanted a few serious poses from the kids and kate is a little bit better at that than jack. for the first photo i asked her to just sit and look at me and for the second one i pulled a page from the richard avedon playbook and asked her how she’d feel if anything bad happened to maggie (our dog). she immediately gave me a true sad face and not a comical or fake version of it. i love looking at the photo because it’s not just her mouth that is sad but her eyes. if you didn’t know her or what i said to make her look that way, you’d wonder what the girl was thinking. there would be a thousand possibilities and any of them could be true. i love it.
(anyone interested in sitting for me? no charge – you just have to sit there and let me play around for a while. shoot me an email if you’re up for it.)
(lest you think i’m the meanest mother in the world for even suggesting anything bad would happen to our dog, i knew kate could handle it. she was fine seconds later. the photo you see is literally a thousandth of a second of sadness that i caught. it’s not like i hid her in the attic for five hours and told the world that she floated away in a balloon, right?)
