ABSTRACT
Can a photograph evoke, address, and engage the city when the photographic subject is NOT the city, NOT an urban landscape, NOT buildings, or a streetscape, or a social setting? Can a photographer whose primary mode is the individual portrait produce images that can stand, individually and collectively, as urban social documentary? And if so, where does this quality reside? In the implicit social information and commentary revealed or at least intuited through dress, setting, and expression? In the interior of the subject him or herself, and how self-presentation illuminates social context, time, space, and place? In the evocations rippling out beyond the portrait via the photographer’s craft and aesthetic-in the framing, composition, lighting, choices of focus?
