The police know that hands are important. Why don’t portrait photographers?
A close-up of someones face tells me what that person wanted the photographer to see. He may or may not be showing me his true character. Show me his hands or at least some of his body posture and I will feel much more confident that the face is not a lie.
In addition to wanting to see the hands, I don’t like face-only portraits because they are often compositionally clumsy. The human face is, by its conformation, a lousy subject as a solo object in the rectangle of a picture. What’s on the center? The nose. What should be the most compelling? Two nearly identical eyes; a static bar with no decisive fulcrum. What might show emotion? The mouth which is down and on center; no help for the rigidly static symmetry of the features.
Take a look at some good portraits. To make the features more dynamic, you’ll see a variety of tricks: close one eye, radically tilt the head, crop the picture so the eyes are way off center, put one side of the face in deep shade, having multiple photos of the same person in a composite picture, having objects overlap the face, etc. Rarely do you see a flat frontal face that is fairly near the center of the frame. One example of that is Avedon’s portrait of Picasso and I think it is not one of Avedon’s best (to be charitable).
Take a look at the portraits of the Richard Avedon and the Howard Schatz site. They are the two photographers that I can think of off the top of my head, who like to do close-up portraits that exclude all else. Compare their close-up portraits with their ones that show more of the body, especially those that include hands. Also, in their close-up portraits, look at how they make a dynamic composition out of just the facial features. (Both sites are Flash sites. Sorry about that! Also, on the Avedon site, go to his Archives, then choose Portraits.)
The above are my personal opinions. I don’t do portraits, so these are purely my reaction as a viewer of photographs of people.
-Julie
