The only trouble with having a class of sixteen is that when exercises are done in pairs, The Professor gets left out ... Today's great introducers had everyone getting into pairs to take portraits of each other - with the subject having free range to choose setting, posture, expression ... but the photographer could also pose, direct ... and then each photographer chose just one image, which s/he emailed the other person, so that they could write a poem (necessarily brief, given the time constraints!) about the image and the experience of being photographed. Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia was somewhere at the core of this, as were various other quotations. But I was struck by - to me - the wrongness of the Avedon statement that I reproduce here. Because I raised my camera very quickly, in class, to take a picture of Anna - she might have had a second or two to register that she was being photographed, but I don't know, and I had a telephoto lens on ... But this is quite definitely, so far as I'm concerned, a "photographic portrait," yet I'm not sure that Anna is in possession of that knowledge at the time it was taken ...
OK, you wanted this evening's sunset? Here it is! Tonight's storm seems to be on its way ...
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