While I was working out of town recording some teaching videos for photographers, I worked closely for days with the director of the production. He was an incredibly interesting man inside and out, and was tattooed from head to toe. At the end of the production on the last day, before we packed up, I asked if I could photograph him.
I took no more than a minute or two, used the studio equipment that I had been recording with, and created this portrait of him before he even took his headphones off.
I find faces to be fascinating, and even when I’m not photographing someone, I find myself watching people and trying to read into their personality from the tiny details. Richard Avedon, my favorite fashion photographer and someone who truly understood how to photograph faces, addressed this same thing in himself. He said if he hadn’t become a photographer, he’d probably have been some kind of fortune teller or reader of some kind, because he couldn’t turn off the fact that he was always reading and analyzing faces.
I’m very grateful that I’m a photographer and get to create really custom portraits for people. Every face has a story, and this man’s face and this image is very captivating. I’m planning on creating a final print and sending it to him, and I hope that he too finds it as interesting and captivating as I do.