What are we really asking a portrait to tell us about a person?
Last week, I wrote about the language of symbols and the way an object can begin to carry meaning simply by being placed inside an image. A key is no longer only a key when someone holds it deliberately in her hand. A flower changes when it is offered, protected, abandoned, or allowed to wither. Even light and shadow begin telling us where to look and, more importantly, how we should feel about what we find there.
But objects are only part of the visual language of a portrait. The person holding them is speaking too.
The position of a body, the direction of a gaze, the distance between two people, the clothing we place around them, and even the expression we choose from hundreds made during a session all contribute to something much larger than appearance. Together, they begin constructing an idea of who this person is.
Portraiture has been doing this for a very long time.
Long before photography gave us the ability to record a face with extraordinary accuracy, portraits were already being used to communicate wealth, power, devotion, intelligence, lineage, beauty, authority, and countless other things people wanted understood about themselves. When we look at a painted portrait from centuries ago, we aren't simply looking at what someone looked like. We are looking at a carefully constructed version of how they were meant to be seen.
The fabrics mattered. The jewelry mattered. The books resting nearby, the landscape visible through a window, the flowers, animals, architecture, gesture, posture, and expression all contributed to the identity being presented.
In that sense, a portrait has never really been a neutral record of a person.
It has always been an argument of sorts.
This is who I am.
Or, more interestingly,
This is how I want you to understand me.
Who We Decide Someone Is
I have been thinking about this quite a bit while looking back through my recent photographs of Hekate and Persephone.
Their mythology gives us a great deal before I ever make a photograph. These are figures who have been written about, painted, sculpted, interpreted, translated, romanticized, feared, reclaimed, and reinvented for thousands of years. By the time I bring them into my own work, they arrive carrying the weight of all those stories with them.
But knowing the mythology doesn't answer the question of who they will become in my photographs.
I still have to decide.
What kind of Hekate am I creating? What kind of Persephone? What happens when I place them beside one another? Who leads? Who watches? Who protects? Who appears certain, and who seems caught somewhere between one thing and another?
Those questions are answered partly through the symbols I wrote about last week, but they are answered just as strongly through the women themselves.
Hekate's keys matter, certainly, but so does the way she holds them.
Persephone's flowers carry meaning, but so does the way her body occupies the space around them.
When the two women appear together, the space between them becomes part of the portrait. A hand placed slightly differently can make a gesture feel protective, possessive, hesitant, intimate, or ceremonial. A turned shoulder can create distance. A direct gaze can change who seems to hold authority inside the frame.
None of those decisions rewrite the mythology. They simply allow me to enter into conversation with it.
That is one of the things I love most about creating work inspired by old stories. I don't have to illustrate them faithfully in order to respect them. I can ask what these women might look like through another lens, in another time, interpreted by another woman who brings her own experiences and questions to their stories.
And suddenly portraiture becomes less about depicting a character and more about deciding who I believe that character is allowed to be.
The Camera Doesn't Simply Record
Photography has always had a slightly complicated relationship with truth.
A photograph feels factual because something really was standing in front of the camera. Light traveled through a lens and left behind evidence of a particular moment. Hekate was there. Persephone was there. The dresses, pomegrante, and keys were physically in the studio. If we want to be terribly practical about the whole thing, the camera recorded what was placed in front of it.
But that doesn't make the photograph objective.
I decided where the women would stand. I chose what would enter the frame and what would disappear beyond it. I decided where the light would fall and what I was willing to leave in darkness. I directed bodies, hands, faces and eyes, and then I chose one fraction of a second from all the fractions of seconds that existed during that session.
The women in front of my camera participated too. They interpreted what I asked of them through their own bodies and expressions. Sometimes they gave me exactly what I imagined. Sometimes they did something I hadn't considered and the photograph became better because of it.
Somewhere between all of those decisions, a portrait emerged.
That doesn't make it false.
It simply means that photography, like every other form of portraiture before it, is an act of interpretation.
And once I began thinking about portraiture that way, the idea of creating a "true" portrait of someone became much less interesting to me.
I don't know that such a thing exists.
We Are More Than One Version of Ourselves
Most of us are accustomed to seeing ourselves in fairly ordinary circumstances. We catch ourselves in mirrors while getting ready. We appear in photographs at birthdays and dinners. We take pictures with people we love and occasionally surrender ourselves to the questionable judgment of a driver's license camera.
Those images aren't false either. They simply represent certain versions of us.
But human beings are wonderfully inconsistent creatures, and I don't think any of us exists as only one person.
We can be confident in one room and uncertain in another. We can be responsible, practical adults who pay bills and remember appointments while still carrying entire imaginary worlds around inside us. We can be soft without being weak, powerful without being hard, sensual without performing for anyone, and frightened while still being extraordinarily brave.
Sometimes several of those things are true at exactly the same time.
That complexity is where portraiture becomes interesting to me.
I am less interested in asking a photograph to prove who someone really is than I am in allowing it to explore who else they might be.
Maybe that person already exists comfortably inside them. Maybe it is someone they remember being. Maybe it is someone they haven't given themselves permission to meet yet.
Or maybe they simply want to wear an enormous dress, stand in impossible light, and be somebody completely different for an afternoon.
I think there is value in that too.
Why We Play Pretend
Children understand the pleasure of becoming someone else without needing to justify it.
Give them a blanket and it becomes a royal cape, a hiding place, a tent, or the entrance to another world. They can become queens, monsters, explorers, animals, witches, superheroes, or entirely invented creatures and move between those identities without worrying whether any of it says something profound about them.
Then we grow up and become terribly serious about ourselves.
We still consume enormous amounts of imagination. We read novels, watch films, obsess over characters, visit museums, listen to music, play games, and surround ourselves with stories. We simply become less willing to step inside them ourselves.
That is why I keep returning to the idea that adults still need permission to play pretend.
Not because pretending allows us to escape who we are, but because sometimes it gives us another way to explore it.
There is an unusual freedom in knowing that you don't have to remain the person you're pretending to be. You can borrow something for a little while. Power. Vulnerability. Extravagance. Darkness. Softness. Sensuality. Strangeness. You can exaggerate one small part of yourself until it fills the entire frame and then, when we're finished, go home and put your regular clothes back on.
Except now there is a photograph.
And there you are.
Not necessarily as you normally appear, but as someone you were capable of becoming.
I find that distinction fascinating.
Could This Also Be Me?
This is why I don't believe a conceptual portrait is necessarily less truthful than a conventional one.
If I photograph someone dressed as a mythological figure, obviously I am not documenting her ordinary Tuesday afternoon. We both know that. There is no deception happening.
But the fact that the world around her is invented doesn't mean everything happening inside the photograph is.
The confidence might be real.
The vulnerability might be real.
The way she inhabits her body might be something she has never seen from the outside before. The expression that appears for a fraction of a second may belong entirely to her even if the character, clothing, and environment do not.
The fiction simply created the circumstances in which that version of her could appear.
And that is one of the most interesting things a portrait can offer us.
Not an answer to the enormous and probably impossible question of Who am I?
But something smaller and more generous:
Could this also be me?
The Person Inside the Frame
When I return to the photographs of Hekate and Persephone, I know exactly how much of what I'm seeing was constructed. I remember moving the lights, arranging the fabric, positioning the keys, adjusting hands and asking for expressions. I know where the mythology ends and where my own interpretation begins.
But I also know there were moments I didn't construct.
A glance happened differently than I expected. A gesture softened. The relationship between two bodies changed simply because the women responded to one another rather than to me.
Those moments remind me why portraiture continues to fascinate me even after all the planning is finished.
We can build an entire world around someone. We can choose every object, research every symbol, control the light and carefully consider what we want the photograph to say.
And then a human being steps inside it.
Suddenly the image contains something we couldn't completely plan.
Maybe that is where the philosophy of portraiture has always lived: somewhere between how we construct ourselves and what escapes that construction anyway.
A portrait can tell us how someone looked, certainly. But it can also tell us how they wished to be seen, what they valued, what they imagined, what they performed, what they were becoming, or simply who they allowed themselves to be for the brief moment when the shutter opened.
It doesn't have to contain the whole truth of a person.
I don't think any photograph could.
Sometimes it is enough to say:
Here is one way I existed.
And sometimes, more wonderfully:
Here is someone I discovered I could be.
Come Step Into the Frame
You don't have to arrive at Studio Gemini knowing exactly who you want to become.
You don't need a character chosen, a costume waiting in your closet, or a fully developed concept tucked under your arm. Sometimes all we need is the beginning of something: a story you've always loved, a feeling you want to explore, an image you can't stop thinking about, a side of yourself you rarely show, or simply the desire to see yourself differently.
From there, we can figure out the rest together.
Because the most interesting portrait isn't always the one that shows us exactly who we already know ourselves to be.
Sometimes it's the one that introduces us to someone else who has been there all along.
What version of yourself have you never seen in a photograph?
Maybe it begins with a story, a character, a feeling, or simply the curiosity to see yourself differently. You don't need to know exactly what it looks like yet. That's part of what we'll discover together.