Tom Martin

 

A lot of the shot's in my Bands gallery have involved fairly elaborate set ups and lighting, I realised the other day when I started out shooting my portraits that the idea of going out with just my camera and nothing else has almost become alien to me. So for these portraits I decided to go right back to basics, only 50mm lens, no flash, no lights, nothing.

Anyone who’s studied the contextual side of photography at Uni or college may have come across a book called Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. For a long time this book has been my archenemy, Barthes is fairly notorious for being tricky to read. Anyway there’s a chapter in Camera Lucida called ‘To Signify’ which is illustrated with a photograph taken by Richard Avedon in 1963 of a man named William Casby, who was born into slavery. The image is a really striking portrait and serves as a good example for the chapter, which is about the conscious and sub-conscious information we automatically attach to images we see (I think!?!). I wanted to shoot a really stripped back portrait of a just a face like the Casby photo to see what the image would signify about the sitter (and also the viewer). Obviously Jack isn’t a slave, but the image below still seems to say a surprising amount about him even though there’s no written description or explanation of personality.

Anyway thats just a little explaination of the thought process behind this little experiment.

William Casby