External Beauty

When photographing people, and in particular women, there is a continuum of the images which are possible to create. Earlier this year I flew to Mexico City and wandered around the city from just before dawn till into the night looking for images. Late in the afternoon I came around a corner and there sitting on the ground was an especially old women covered in thick wrinkles. She sat in the dirt and begged. She was beautiful, but her eyes glowed with what seemed to be a hatred for the world. She wouldn’t let me photograph her. This encounter really got me thinking about how to use images to create, at least, an external definition of a person.

At some point one comes to a place in their photography where the camera is nothing more than an extension of your imagination. It is an almost nonexistent tool enabling you to capture the images you have already constructed and defined in your mind’s eye. When photographing someone, the images range from awkward and unprofessional on the left, to beautiful and attractively defining in the center, all the way to sexy and wrongly provocative on the far right. There are obviously hundreds of other well thought out factors in every image I create. But my goal is to aim for the center and create images which define crisp clean external beauty at its best. My drive is to come out with images where one is objectively able to see a person’s God given human beauty, to see the qualities of their personality, to see a representation of their external best without the distraction of awkward or provocative images on the polar ends of the continuum.

As I aim for this in a lot of ways there is a separation from me and my subject. In one sense I feel a tie to them in order to make the connection needed to create the above, but in another sense there is complete detachment where who I am without my camera never transfers into the me which is creating the images. My subject leaves and I am left with the single best image, or series of images, which hopefully defines the essence of what they would want to be seen as. All to say that photography is a lot more than setting up some lights and snapping a bunch of photos of a pretty girl or your bud in his new trendy jacket. If God is not glorified I would throw away my camera tonight, but as long as there is a way to further His kingdom through the creation of images I will continue to do so.

The topic of the internal beauty which I attempt to define through external images will need to be the topic of another post.