Photographers are a dime a dozen these days. Everybody knows that. Give a kid a camera and internet access and he can have a million photography portfolios and just as many followers. That doesn’t make the kid a great photographer.
To me, a great photographer will show you something you’ve never seen, or shows you something you have seen in a new light. A great photographer will make you think and can tell a lot with just one image. To me, a great portrait photographer doesn’t just take a picture of someone, but rather captures a bit of the subject’s personality whether they (the subject) realize it or not. A great portrait photographer gets the image, just when the subject opens up for a brief moment and lets their true self out. Sometimes that moment never comes. Sometimes the photographer misses it when it does.
But when you merge the photographer and the subject into the same person, you remove what I see as the biggest barrier to taking a genuinely good portrait. When the photographer takes an image of themselves, they don’t have any need to put on a different face to suit the person they are posing for. And once they accept the camera as an extension of themselves, the self portrait merely becomes a look within.
If I had a two hour conversation with a stranger and then saw a self portrait that person had taken, I’m sure I’d learn ten times more about them from the portrait than the conversation.
