I think I'll struggle with portraiture for as long as I am a photographer. The extraordinary challenge of capturing the essence of a person. At the moment I am mulling over the term subject - as soon as someone is your subject, they are effectively trapped and/or controlled so there is no chance whatsoever that they will be revealed. How can a prisoner ever be themselves? A slightly extreme analogy but very rarely do I see a revealing portrait in circumstances fully controlled by a photographer.
To some recent images and why I think they work.
Males are generally not good at not doing things so if they are engaged in a task of their own making, they'll reveal themselves. The trick for the photographer is to be ready by anticipating the technical requirements of the image.
The image below, taken at a wedding, succeeded technically because it has frozen the sitter (1/350th of a second), knocked out the background (200 mm, f8.0). The image succeeded aesthetically because of the beautiful contrast between the foreground and background. The image succeeded as a portrait because it is so vivacious.
The portrait may also have succeeded because I had met and chatted to him the day before at the wedding rehearsal in the church.
And just after the wedding ceremony, I photographed him skylarking and this enabled our rapport to develop, at no stage did I try to control or censure what he did and this may have given him the freedom to play, to be himself.
