Thanks for the publicity Stewart and thanks to everyone else for their kind comments. 🙂
I feel Stewart hasn't given himself enough credit on his quality as a sitter. To explain, this is an ongoing project of mine with the working title of 'Stress Portraits/Photographic Interrogation'. The (perhaps slightly contoversial) concept behind it is to use mild forms of current interrogation techniques in an attempt to see if any 'truth' is revealed in the portrait.
The techniques involve mild stress positions such as standing in a crouched position and/or holding weights with outstretched arms. The idea being that the distraction caused might momentarily strip the sitters of their natural reserve and propensity to 'pose' and perhaps produce a revealing portrait.
The idea arose from my personal doubts over what exactly a portrait revealed and I expected to see nothing but a string of uncomfortable people. I was initially unsettled when I first saw all the shots together because the expressions and poses weren't as uniform as I had envisaged they would be but after cogitating over it for a while and spending some time with the images I am now starting to enjoy the surprising variety this rigid technique yielded and feel that this method may actually have produced insightful portraits of people whom do not generally feel comfortable having their picture took.
So do they reveal 'truth'? Well it surprises me to say it but I actually think they may do. Some images appear to show more than others, which I guess is because, just like any form of interrogations, with my pictorial interrogation you have to get the amount of discomfort just right to make any natural pretence melt away, but I do feel many of the shots have revealed something of the core nature of the sitters.
I'm still working on the other shots at the moment, but I'll publish a link when I have more to show.
Bob.
