Exercise 3: Portraiture typology

For this exercise, I wanted to explore the theme of ‘imagination and self-interpretation’, specifically in children. Being a father myself, I find it a joy to see my little ones playing ‘make believe’, where new worlds, character’s and languages are invented every day. Though, as adults, we still have that ability to be ‘child like’, we choose when to do so carefully as it’s not considered the correct way to act and there is certainly a social stigma attached to immature behaviour in grown-ups. As well as this, a child’s ability to give fictional examples to the simplest of things comes naturally to them, where, as adults, we tend to give more literal descriptions when explaining the exact same thing.

Using my daughter, Mia, as the subject for my typology portraits, I took various shots of her wearing six different costumes that her favourite characters’ from a variety of films wear. For each costume, I asked her to portray how she thinks that particular character should. The results were interesting to say the least and where some of the actions did portray the character in question, for example, the swirling of the magic wand for Hermione Granger, others certainly did not. It is obviously hard to say if these false actions were ones she did in fact associate with the person she was acting out, or, if she was playing up in front of the camera, so to speak.

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They say never to work with animals and / or children, so, to make the process easier for myself the photographic set up was incredibly simple. As I wanted the viewer to be immediately drawn to Mia’s actions, emotions and the costumes she was wearing, I didn’t want the background to be over-elaborate. Through researching typology, I noticed that regardless of the subject being photographed, the framing and placement of these subjects are mostly always the same throughout the set. To ensure my images followed trend, there were a couple of things I did. Firstly, I made a mark for Mia to stand on and told her to stay on it as best she could. Secondly, I placed my camera on a tripod and effectively set the frame around her. Did it work? To a certain extent. I think the creative mind of a five year old won the day and this is evident in my final selection. However, I actually think it works incredibly well and reinforces what the images were meant to represent.

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References

Tate. (2014). ‘Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher: Water Towers (1972-2009)’ [Online] Available from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bernd-becher-and-hilla-becher-water-towers-p81238