Jeremy Esland - Algarve Photographer

"What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."

Susan Sontag (1933 - 2004)

More photographs are taken of people than any other subject matter. My guess is that the number pictures of people taken each year would be greater than all the photographs of other subjects added together. Nothing fascinates us more than an image of someone close to us or someone to whom we would like to be close. Curiously, though, research has demonstrated that we spend less time studying a photograph of a person than if the image were of a dog, say, or a sunset. This is explained by the ability of our brains to 'absorb' faces very quickly. In a split second we recognize (or fail to recognize) the subject and evaluate their disposition (happy, sad or whatever). Job done... game over! Our interest then moves to other aspects of the image: the enviroment, the subject's clothes, the jewellery. Ask someone to comment on an image of yourself and you'll inevitably get back comments on the hairstyle, or the earrings, or the jacket you're wearing. At best you might get something like "Your mouth isn't quite right." What you'll rarely hear is that the image exposes your loneliness, or reflects your kindness to others, or shows your self-confidence.

The fact of the matter is that images of people, although so common, are uncommonly difficult to do well. Beyond snapshots, beyond stiff, uninspired 'passport portraits', lies the challenge to produce interesting images: images that tell a convincing truth, or images that lie convincingly.