In the early stages of photography, the one style that held a certain aura of magic over any other was the portrait. The earliest portraits were the daguerreotypes, in which sitters had to hold a position for a lengthy amount of time while the exposure took place. Although this method was, at times, uncomfortable for the sitters, the results were a success. In 1841, Richard Beard was the first to open a daguerreotype studio. Others soon followed him and the portraits that were produced became more elaborate as props and backdrops were introduced. Portraits of individuals were created. Portraits of families were created. Portraits of influential political figures were created. Soon, the portrait became a commercial success (Marien, p. 61).

        The portrait has become the standard method of identification, be it in family photos, driver's licenses, or other forms where one simply needs to know what someone looks like. But some photographers have not been content with simply photographing a person for validation of one's existence. Artists have turned the portrait into a tool of expression.

        A lot can be learned inside of a face. This quest for knowledge is something that drives some to pursue the portrait beyond the identification. It's for a greater understanding of the people one sees everyday, and by knowing those surroundings, a person ends up learning more about oneself in the process.

        Diane Arbus, a photographer from the mid-twentieth century, frequently went into settings where the "freaks" were, as she referred to them, and photographed those she encountered. She wasn't part of this subculture herself. To the contrary, she was born into a wealthy Jewish family. Still, she described the act of photographing these freaks by stating: "There are always two things that happen. One is recognition and the other is that it's totally peculiar. But there's some sense in which I always identify with them." (Lewis).

        Sometimes she didn't intentionally pull the freaks out of society, but instead pulled a moment of a freak from within someone of mainstream society. In "Child With Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park," she saw an instance of madness in an otherwise normal child. Her contact sheet shows the normal actions a child will perform in front of a camera. But by delaying the procedure of her photo-taking method by stating that she was looking for the right angle, she managed to create impatience inside of the boy as he exclaimed "Take the picture already!" The tension he expressed was captured in her camera, setting it apart from all the other photographs she took of him (Child). Was he a disturbed child? I'd safely say no. But one cannot say the child didn't perform this act. Inside the context of a complete contact sheet, it's just a normal step in the progression of a photo shoot. But as a piece in a body of work, it's a moment of expression for the photographer to show the complexities of human nature. The subject is simply the tool used to express what the photographer feels, sometimes with little regard to the individual being photographed.

        Mitch Kern states that "while photographs may seem entirely neutral, behind every camera, behind every photograph, is a photographer" (Kern). It is this distinction, this knowledge going into a personal portrait project, that separates the portrait as a commercial apparatus used to glorify the sitter, and instead makes it a tool for the photographer to speak without uttering a single word. Much as how a landscape photographer might seek out a pattern in nature to photograph, and thereby expressing something internally about how he or she sees the world, the portrait photographer seeks out those moments, faces, occurrences in human life that take place everyday, but are so fleeting that the importance isn't truly realized until the expression can be isolated and studied by a tool that froze the action at 1/200 of a second. That is how quickly humans can transition through stages of being, and what makes the true test of capturing that on a negative, piece of glass, or digital sensor.

        Sometimes the moment of distinction between a "normal" photograph and one that goes onto greater importance isn't an odd shot of a hundred, but is the emotional exhaustion of a subject. Free from the pretenses of how a photograph should end up, they knowingly let their guard down for a moment. Is this the window into the true person being photographed?

        When Richard Avedon photographed Marilyn Monroe, it came after hours of her performing in front of the camera. But the Marilyn Monroe that most know from films, interviews, and photos, isn't the real Marilyn Monroe. In fact, she doesn't even physically exist. According to Avedon, she is a creation that Marilyn Monroe, the woman, created. She was a persona to portray in front of people who expected such a person (Hambourg).

        This photograph of Marilyn Monroe came after the planned shoot. As she sat in a corner, quiet and without expression, Avedon approached her with his camera and waited until she didn't say no, then took that picture. It is a photograph of a woman tired from the performance she gave. Tired from being someone she truly was not. She was worn down and her true self was the only thing left to give. Looking down, she doesn't face the camera like in a traditional portrait. Her eyes show the weariness in her body. Her mouth is dragging from being fixed into a smile for too long. It's not a traditional portrait, yet it's the most accurate portrait of Marilyn Monroe, the person behind the facade.

        Monica Ruzansky, a recent MFA graduate of the International Center of Photography, has taken the portrait process and turned it into an interactive session of the sitter with him or herself. She places a camera inside of a box that has a two-way mirror on the outer side, which the camera shoots through. People are invited to stand in front of the mirror and collect their own expression while she photographs them from inside of her system (Ruzansky).

        Her work, different from the full body portrait or the torso and head portraits mentioned above, focuses simply on the faces of her subjects. But everything mentioned so far is still very similar, for it's the expression that tells the story in Arbus and Avedon's works, along with Ruzansky's. In the collection of photographs she has on her portfolio site, she clearly has a distinct method in which the photograph is to be captured. The box sentiment in which she photographs also appears in the individual photos. Encased inside of something, a person cannot expand or fully stretch out to use the whole body to explain something. Instead, actions such as facial movements explain situations. This is precisely what Ruzansky does in her photographs.

        Who are these people and why should I care about them? But the true question I ask myself is, "Why do I care about them?" I have no answers, only questions. Why does the man with the black hat and red scarf have a cut on his lip? His expression shows that of someone who may not have a lot of things he needs to do at that moment, yet still wants to be somewhere else, possibly doing something more important. His expression is self-composed. Does he want Monica to realize this as she holds him up? This image is in direct contrast to the one of the man wearing glasses who is turned to the side. He seems to be putting on a small performance in front of the mirror, eager to have his photo taken and talked about in future photography essays such as this one. Does he perform this same expression and pose in front of a mirror before he leaves his house? In any case, he obviously cares about himself, and is the opposite of the prior mentioned man.

        Ruzansky shows a wide diversity of subjects in her work. Various ages, races and ethnicities, and both sexes are present in her work. By doing so, she is showing the range of her surroundings. These are the people she sees everyday. They are all unique and different. But inside the restraints she has set out to photograph them in, they are also all the same.

        Mitch Kern, a photographer located in Alberta, Canada and quoted earlier in this essay, has taken this view of diversity and transformed it into a unique body of work centering on portraits. In a body of work titled "White Lies," he takes the diversity of humans and neutralizes it to show that actually, we aren't that much different. His method is similar to that of Ruzansky, at least in regards to putting people inside of a "box," in this case the box being white paint. Whereas she allowed a range of clothing options, slight variances of expressions, and the person's own skin to let them tell their story, Kern has stripped all of that away and only allows a face void of any exterior identification. The white paint actually seems to be a form of transparency for everything but the hair and eyes. But by doing so, this allows the eyes to be the one thing on a person to truly allow expression to come forth.

        When I see the eyes of the old man, I see his age. They are tired, yet full of a lived life and the experiences that come with that. The catchlights reflect this back at me. This contrasts with the young boy's eyes, which are big and bright, free from age dragging his top eyelids down. But they also need to be big in order to not miss anything new that life still has to offer him. In-between the two of them in age, roughly, I see a man whose eyes show sorrow. He is sad about something. Is life not what he expected it would be, yet he realizes that he still has much time to go? I'm not sure, but there is something different in his eyes from anyone else's.

        With the eyes isolated out like this, it really pulls my attention in and helps me focus on something in a human that in everyday life would probably be creepy to do: staring into a stranger's eyes to learn about them. People turn away, and for good reason. There's an old phrase, probably horribly cliche but still the bearer of enough relevance to warrant its inclusion in here, that states, "the eyes are the windows to the soul." Whether or not it's true, I do not know, but I believe it.

        Perhaps the most well known photograph that pulls the viewer directly into the subject's eyes in one by Steve McCurry, which features a 12-year old Afghanistan girl who fled to Pakistan in 1983. It would later be on the cover of National Geographic. It would be easy to say that this was a rare or chance moment for him to photograph someone with piercing eyes, but that just isn't so. A look at other photographs by him shows the same vision for creating portraits where the eyes leap out to the viewer and enable the story of the subject to be told. To put it bluntly, or perhaps ironically, he has an eye for eyes.

        When I see the Afgan girl, I see a person amidst incredible trauma. There is no smile, because I doubt the opportunity to smile has been available for some time. With her village destroyed by Soviet helicopters, she was in a refuge camp along with many other people displaced from their homes during the invasion (Steve). Lost, displaced, and too young to be enduring such hardships, the years she has already lived show in her eyes. She is the visual symbol of what her people went through.

        Yet, her eyes also show a strong person. She is fully grown mentally, if not physically, but she is able to carry the burden. The way in which she stares into the camera speaks dramatically different from the portraits where people take time out of their life to enthusiastically be recorded for posterity sake. This girl is being pulled out of her life so others can partake in the recording. With no inhibitions set before her, she is completely honest with what her life has dealt her, and she tells the story with her eyes.

        There is an alternative medical treatment known as iridology, which studies the iris for changes that correlate into changes of the health in the body. The medical world is torn between supporting this approach and casting it away as a pseudoscience, but the practitioners of it stand firmly behind it in the effectiveness (Iridology). I don't think a photographer sets out to indicate what sickness someone has when they photograph a person's eyes, but I do feel that both iridologist and photographers are on the same track when they look to the eyes for telling the story of what is going on inside of the person before them. This is why, when you have something important to tell someone, the phrase "look me in the eye" is most often referred to. It's the sign of absolute truth. The body can lie. Eyes never can. This is why eyes aren't just included in a portrait, they are the portrait. They are the meat of the story. The rest of the body is just context.

"Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park." Wikipedia. 24 February, 2007.

Hambourg, Maria Morris and Mia Fineman. "Avedon's Endgame." Richard Avedon's Portraits. New York, and The Metropolitan Museam of Art: Henry N. Abrams, Incorporated:, 2002.

"Iridology." Wikipedia. 16 February, 2007. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridology>

Kern, Mitch. Home page.

Lewis, Jone Johnson. Diane Arbus Quotes. 2005.

Marien, Mary Warner. Photography: A Cultural History, Second Edition. New Jersey, Pearson Education, Inc., 2006

Ruzansky, Monica. Home page.

"Steve McCurry: Unveiling the Face of War." In Focus. 2001.