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9월 20일 Beautiful PeopleI came to the office to get some work done on Saturday and stepped into a costume party of the new first-year class outside the building. It was a beautiful day -- clean, light, magical, the transition of seasons palpable in the air. On this particular day, you can smell the exuberance of youth, too. To the contrary of popular beliefs, glowingly healthy, good-looking young people don't usually make appealing photography subjects. My teacher used to say, if you really have to photograph people, go for little children and really, really old people. I couldn't understand the rationale behind it. But the method has face validity: flipping through any travel brochure or National Geographic-style magazine, you'll indeed find that those two demographic groups are most often represented, and they often make the most impressive images. But why? Over the years the answer slowly came to me. Little children and the elderly possess the gift of completely immersing themselves in the present moment -- they can be perfectly aligned with the Here and Now, which renders them an integral part of their natural surroundings and activities. And nothing less than that can make a great picture. Often, seeing into their eyes, you feel you almost meet their souls. Susan Sontag once said that to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability and mutability. And that revelation is what gives both the photographer and the viewer a sense of communion. Young people, on the other hand, are often too self-conscious and occupied with their conceptualized self identity to be completely aligned with the present moment. For instance, they may appear to be fully engrossed in a conversation, but their minds are wandering elsewhere: either searching for the next smart thing to say, or checking their mental Blackberrys for the next stimulus, or being hijacked by an endless stream of thoughts, memories and fantasies. As a result, it is quite typical that in a photograph they often look oddly removed from the surroundings or whatever they appear to be doing. The integrity and authenticity of the moment falls apart. Just look at one of those ubiquitous dentists' ads portraying an attractive Caucasian woman smiling ten sparkling white teeth. She looks as unreal as her staged smile as her porcelain teeth. Pictures of young people, even if unstaged, have the tendency to fall into the same trap: too self-conscious, too tense, hiding more than revealing. The challenge for the photographer, then, is to capture those rare moments when a subject is completely relaxed, unguarded and spontaneous, momentarily lost in the stream of time, lost (or, paradoxically, present) at a place called Here and Now, and then you'll see their true self shining through, in all its quintessential humanness. And that, is what gives a photo -- or life itself -- true vitality. 댓글 (4개)
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