Nikio

So it has been a while... again.

When I photograph people, many of them find me annoying. Really. And I can't really blame them; I am not happy with just one or two photos. I must take them at least 50. But there are profound reasons why.

First of all; I wanna make sure that the person looks good on my photograph. In order to achieve that two things must happen; the person must be adopted on my shooting (for that I must be there a while) so that he or more often she is relaxed enough to look natural. And a larger amount of photos must be taken in order to statistically ensure a technically good photograph (in terms of eye blinking, expression, and also focus, sharpness, composition, etc).

But there is a deeper reason and it lies in the way I think about photography. Usually, when I'm in the zone, I'm not even thinking about the object of my shooting. I am literally making the photograph, not taking it. I am thinking in 2D. I am producing a 2-dimensional pattern of our visual communication. At least I try to. The people or objects are just grand means to achieve that. So even if I did 20 photos with you, I might have a new message to deliver or a new emotion to visualize. And that has nothing (or little at best) to do with documenting your physical appearance. For that, one or two photos would surely be enough. But for producing items of visual communication, I could work with a singe model for years... I try to find the next level of portraiture where models are actually actors (very much like in movies) who co-author my story. That story can be also be documentary, but not necessarily. And this is also why I started to systematically study other fields of art like painting, movie-making, sculpting... I am especially interested in works of Asian artists who are supposed to have a bit different way of thinking than us, Europeans. I read and heard a lot about that from many neurological sources, it is a bit too complex to go into it rihgt now, but there are great things there to discover!