Expressive Portraiture | What is Expressive Photography?
© 2011 Wazari Wazir | Expressive Portraiture
“If it Makes You Laugh, If it Makes You Cry, If it Rips Your Heart, That’s a Good Picture.”
– Eddie Adams –
I believe that Eddie Adams quote above summed it all about “What is Expressive Photography” is all about. Maybe I should keep my entry short with the quote but just to make things clear, Expressive Photography does not necessarily involved human being, in can be any subject, it can be still life, it can be landscape, seascape, it can be a mountains, an animal, it can be anything as long as the subject mange to touch our heart, evoke our feelings, emotion or our moods.
Expressive photography involves photographs that express a feeling or a mood. Just like Eddie Adams quote there, if it manage to make you laugh, make you cry or rips your heart, it is a good picture and I believe good pictures is a picture that have something expressive.
Just asked yourself, whenever you see any picture, have you feel anything, does it make you smile, does it arouse your anger, does it make you wanted to cry. Those are the sign that you have seen a picture that is expressive. It must be able to evoke your inner feelings, your heart must be touched by the photograph. In other words, you must feel the photograph.
I’ve said that expressive photography does not necessarily involved human in it, it can be a landscape. For an example if you shoot a city centre during busy hour of the day, in a broad daylight, how do you feel and what happen if you shoot a picture of the same city at the same location but in the middle of the night where only few peoples there, the feels is different, you can feel lonely, emptiness, maybe evoke a feeling of sadness compared the busyness of the picture that you took during daytime where everybody is busy going here and there doing their business where at night the street is almost deserted.
Good sunrise or sunset picture can be one of the expressive photography in nature. Sunset makes we feel that we wanted to go home, to be with our family, to spend time with our family, or it can also make someone cheerful, finally they can go to a nightclub or spend the night with their friends, or it can remind someone that it is a time for Maghrib prayer for the Muslim, it can also evoke a feeling of sadness where finally everything is over, where finally everything will become dark, where the day will be replace by the night. Depending on the individual, the emotion will be different, whatever the emotion is, if the photograph manage to trigger any sort of feelings or emotion, that picture is a good example of expressive photography.
Sports photography also have many element of expressive photography, take a look at F1 racing car, if the photographer use panning technique where the picture of the car is sharp and the background is blur, the photographer manage to express the speed of the car, we can feel just by looking at the picture that the car is moving at a very high speed, in this case the photographer manage to show in an expressive way about the speed of the car by using panning technique.
I believe that any type of picture that have the element of “Expression” is a strong picture, it does not necessarily be good at technical aspect, in term of sharpness, less noise or anything technical, but most importantly is the picture must be able to touch our heart more than just meets the eye.
Any subject can be expressive depending on how we photograph it, an empty chair overlooking a big empty lake can evoke a feeling of emptiness, sadness maybe, a beautiful picture of a mountain can trigger an interest to someone to summit it, a beautiful picture of Taj Mahal bathed in the glory of sunset can make someone who haven’t been there wanted to go there while a bad picture of Taj Mahal in a dull weather might hinder someone to visit it, that’s why if you look at the picture printed on the travel brochure, most of the photographs in some way or another manage to invoke our interest to go and visit that particular place, the travel agency or the tourism agency know how to use expressive photography to win people heart or to use expressive photograph to their advantage.
Hopefully by now you should know what is “Expressive Photography” and you can use it to your advantage, you can photographed something that is expressive in nature with your photography skills or you can also express your feelings in a photograph.
