5 Lessons Richard Avedon Taught Me: Portrait Photography (How He Didn't Take Boring Portraits)
To me, portrait photography has become very boring. It’s can be very difficult to capture a worthy portrait of a person because you need to capture the essence of the person at that specific time. You need to tell the story through their poses and your lighting.
Richard Avedon is one of the most popular and well known American portrait and fashion photographers. He had an eye for evoking emotion and conveying it through lighting. In this video, I list 5 characteristics I learned from studying Richard.
Richard Avedon Foundation:
5 Lessons Richard Avedon Taught Me:
1. Print Your Work Large
2. Photography Isn’t the Truth
3.Portraits were more about Richard then the subject
4. Evoke Authentic Emotion
5. Connection and Fear
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Eric, the people in that photo at 7:00 are the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, formerly King VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson.
Thanks for reminding me about his work. I'm gonna dig into his work again. Good video!
I hate taking portraits, I find it difficult with my disabilities, I can’t pose people and I just don’t 'feel it'. However, I think in many ways this increases my respect for those who can do it and I love playing with studio lighting and still lives.
If you give me a book by Avedon, Penn, Cunningham, Litchfield or Neumann and many more and I can sit for hours looking at a single image working out the lighting etc. There’s something very special about how they created with the equipment they had. I think Avedon and Penn had much more respect for each other than they let on,
The 'couple' were the Duke of Westminster (Edward VIII who abdicated) and Wallace Simpson.
Great video Eric, I can talk the greats all day long.
This is great man. It's so true about printing. I have a big time Canon printer. And haven't printed in forever. That needs to change.
Excellent to see you back at portraits….it's what I love to do as well !!!
This is a great series. I recently have been trying to approach my work with the idea “would I print this out and hang it up?” And I’m looking to take more photos like that. A lot of times, I don’t know if it’s my glass (or lack thereof), skills (or lack thereof), or composition/editing (or lack thereof) that is holding me back the most. But I’m definitely getting better approaching my work as a craft. Videos like this are always my favorite. It’s more impactful to hear stories of the people who were here before and the intangibles of their art rather than just “buy this camera and shoot at these settings” no offense intended towards the latter type of video.
most of the pics i take are of "boring" things but actually they mean a bit to me and hope i can make others see what i see