It has been observed of me when viewing photographs I’ve made that I have a knack for capturing emotion. Up to this point I’ve simply received the compliment and thought very little of it, yet it seems to me something that I’d benefit from thinking more deeply on. As capturing images of people is something I do for work as well as a hobby, I might as well try my hand at figuring out how I manage to do it well.
At this moment I think the ability comes down to a few things. Most obvious among them, and what I won’t go into detail about here, is knowing how to make use of one’s equipment. But aside from that, there is the ability to recognize what images best represent emotion (or simply the person who may be emoting), and then also the sort of critical eye necessary to reject the images that don’t meet that standard. In short, capturing photographs that are honest in their representation of their subject requires an eye for the genuine, and a ruthless discrimination against the fraudulent.
When a person is simply being themselves, one witnesses just that, a true representation of the person. Differing circumstances and situations, however, produce things in many that aren’t really true to who they are. Maybe they hold themselves in a certain pose because they think it looks good; maybe they set their jaw to shape their face as they think more attractive; maybe they glance and twitch toward someone they hope notices them; maybe they speak in a way that isn’t quite their regular pattern. All of these things and many more are signs of unease, lack of confidence, even fear at times, particularly fear of how one is perceived by others. And in moments when these things appear in a person, they become a little less themselves, a little less true. Conversely, when they feel safe and confident and at ease, especially in the company of those who they know love them, they are loose, comfortable, secure in themselves, and at their most beautiful.
In conversation, a person may flit from one of these extremes to the other, like a bird between branches. I find that most often, a person shows at least a little bit of their true selves during the course of my interaction with them, even if I only catch it in glimpses and brief windows — I say at least, yet usually more of the conversation than not is lived in this state, a state of comfort, presumably from some instinctual realization that I am in fact a safe person. That has been a desire of mine for nearly all my life: to be a refuge. Maybe, having wished it for so long, I have succeeded in becoming just that.
Getting back then to photography, the difficulty is not only in capturing these in-between and honest moments, but telling them apart from those that are less sincere. In the capturing and then in the processing of an image, one must have an eye for what is true. Were I to recommend a practical course to honing this ability, I would say that the best thing one can do, when not creating, is to be consuming things which are true, things that are beautiful, things that are good. Fill your eyes and your mind with loveliness, feast on it, not as one feasts upon food in a starved frenzy, never realizing the taste of what is on the plate, merely to survive, but as one whose desire is to savour, to relish the good before them. Just as delightful food when eaten slowly and deliberately becomes part of body and aids in its growth, so too you must consume beauty in the world around you, delight in it, and let it change you. For slowly but surely, as you meditate on what is true, what is noble, what is right, what is pure, what is lovely, what is admirable, excellent and praiseworthy, you too will become these things. And when these things are a part of you, you will know them in others as well.
And so, were I to be asked now how it is I capture emotion in a person, I would say that it is because I have glimpsed Truth, and in having my mind opened to that most fundamental beauty, I have become more aware of the beauty that there is in the world, and especially in people — who are, after all, the image of beauty Himself. If one hopes to be able to capture what is true, one must first become aware of it.
love,
Joel