Dajeong Choi / unit 6. reaction essay / thur 34

Emotions in Portrait Photography                Have you ever seen photos in magazines or on the web and wondered how they achieved that look. Portrait photography is the capture of a person, in which the face and expression is predominant. So the focus of this photograph is the person's face, although the entire body and the background may be included. Here are great examples of photograph that capturing facial expression of people mainly. One is "Village School" by Margaret Bourke-White and the other one is called "Children's Puppet Theatre" by Alfred Eisenstadt.              "Village School" is a photograph that captured children in 1934. Without any background, you can feel the dark atmosphere of that age by this one photo. Children are sitting in the room which is very dark and confined. Seeing that the boy sitting in the end only illuminates by the light, it seems like there's only one window in the right corner of background. Most of the children have no signs of emotion on their faces and this makes the photo solemn and static. The two children in the second row appear confused, not knowing where to direct their gazes. However, the boy in the foreground is only straightly gazing front with a mischievous smile on his face. This arrangement draws our attention to this boy and makes us have a slight feeling of hope in this gloomy room.              "Children's Puppet Theatre" is a photograph of another group of children which were published in 1963. You can see at a glance that this is a very dynamic photo. Children are in the outside and responding to the puppet play in very different ways. It is very funny to observe their faces. One boy has his head in his hands and frowns as if he got shocked, while the girl next to him is screaming with scared face. On the center, one child has his arms raised pointing toward and also screaming with his mouth open. The two boys in the lower right corner are gazing in awe. We can recognize children are all fully concentrating on the play and expressing emotions exactly as they feel.              "Village School" and "Children's Puppet Theatre" both are portrait photograph that captured children as a main focus, but the mood is whole different. Children in the first photograph hardly show their emotions, while children in the second photo released their feeling freely. First one is dark, gloomy and solemn, while the second is bright, fun and loud. So the children, the main character of the photo, determined the overall atmosphere: either movement or stillness. Like this, portrait photography conveys its vision usually by using facial expression of the main figure. Divers emotions can be suggested in one photograph and they play important rule to decide our feeling to it. So if we pay attention to those subtle different signs of emotion to figure out what is the photographer's attention.