Is Deadpan Dead?

Michel Hardy-Vallée

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I have grown tired of the whole deadpan aesthetics: look in the camera, don't say cheese, click. It seems that the surest way to make a book now is to take an 8x10 camera, take pictures of celebrities, marines, firefighters, women, men, black, white, red, or blue people and ask them just to look at the camera. Wash, rinse, repeat, publish. Every friggin' portrait now has to be deadpan. No expression. But so what?

It's like deadpan is the new smile.

I know the Colgate smile is cliché and trite, but where is the careful examination of the human face in portraits? I know that in the best of intentions, the deadpan aesthetics is all about capturing very minimal but telling expressions, and there are many people who are good at doing that, but who needs yet another Alec Soth? And even Soth is dismal in some of his portraits because of that over-wrought deadpan expressions (talk about a paradox!). Unless he's onto something, for now he looks dangerously close to a deadpan-also-ran.

August Sander is perhaps the intellectual forefather of the whole deadpan portrait, but he was telling something. What are deadpan portraits really telling now?

Aarrgh. Must. Rant.
 
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lee

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you got a better way Michel? You want high school year book photos? Just saying...

lee\c
 
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Michel Hardy-Vallée

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lee said:
you got a better way Michel? You want high school year book photos? Just saying...

lee\c
Click to expand...

I dunno, look at any good portraitist, Cartier-Bresson or even Sander himself. They're not deadpan in the sense that they are not forced quiet expressions. They're not smiling either. They are shown midway through an expression.

It's not deadpan v. colgate smile, or deadpan v. yearbook; the whole deadpan thing seems to thrive on the idea that the sole prototype of portraiture we have is the exaggerated smile, thus that the only way out is the exaggerated non-smile.

Deadpan does not have to be forced:



When it is enforced upon the subject, it should breathe


Smiling is not a sin, of course


Even though it is not necessary:


Spontaneous reactions can be interesting
Dead Link Removed

In the end, it's all about the character you are depicting
 
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JHannon

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I heard that Karsh often talked with his subjects while setting up and got the photo he wanted, without them knowing he was hitting the shutter. It must have taken great patience and dedication to get those expressions.
 

Videbaek

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Cheers MHV for a sterling walk through famous portraits to make a point! I take your point. Here in Finland we have a "deadpan director", Aki Kaurismäki, who penalizes his actors if they allow an expression to cross their faces. I don't know, the human face is so expressive. Sure, I've seen a hundred thousand "deadpan" portraits of the kind you describe but there's often a tiny unique expression hidden in the face that says something. It's a fashion. What I find much more boring is the context: so often a white background with strong side lighting à la Avedon. Repeition becomes boring then numbing. Photography is so prone to this because of its literal and mechanical nature. There is so very little of real interest.
 
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Michel Hardy-Vallée

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Cheers to you, Svend, thank you very much!

I've seen "Mies vailla menneisyyttä" (in English), and I must say I was struck by how forcefully restrained the acting was. At some moments it worked well to make very subtle and awkward jokes, but at other times it felt unnecessary.

I agree about repetition: to me that's the cheap justification for deadpan. Sadly, not everybody is the Phillip Glass of minimalist photo, and many a long series of near-identical portrait fail for this reason.

I find deadpan so ponderous sometimes. If you allow me a misguided cultural interpretation, it seems that many countries in northern and eastern europe have produced art of great value that shows very restrained emotions (Lutheran influence?); once their success was established, everyone else in other countries just mimicks the minimalism, but their production is devoid of the cultural baggage that produced deadpan.

They just want to look German/Scandinavian/Finnish/Polish, etc; just like many people "wanna be Black" like Lou Reed
 
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Michel Hardy-Vallée

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JHannon said:
I heard that Karsh often talked with his subjects while setting up and got the photo he wanted, without them knowing he was hitting the shutter. It must have taken great patience and dedication to get those expressions.
Click to expand...

I haven't done a lot of portraiture, but I'm starting to do a little more now than I used to.

Earlier on, I used to think that Karsh's portraits were just easy-feel-good shots, but the more I tried to make a portrait, the more I realized how talented this man was.

Of course, I still find some of his portraits to be too flattering, but that's irrelevant to the description of his abilities. His portrait of Einstein, for instance, just IS Einstein, and even more than that. The combination of light, expression, framing, all coalesce together and BANG! you have a portrait that's good for a thousand years. That's talent.
 

dslater

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JHannon said:
I heard that Karsh often talked with his subjects while setting up and got the photo he wanted, without them knowing he was hitting the shutter. It must have taken great patience and dedication to get those expressions.
Click to expand...

While I don't know as it is necessary to hit the shutter in secret, I think your first sentence says it all. Talk with your subject. I admit I'm no portrait photographer, but I has always been my understanding that the most successful ones engage their subjects to bring out a whole constellation of expressions.
 

MenacingTourist

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I hope this has got us thinking.
I'm wondering how I can make portraits more "living" when I'm using a packard shutter and a 100 year old lens. I find beauty in the stillness but you've put something in my head to think about and that's a good thing.

Alan.
 

jovo

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My dad did LF portraits way back when. He found it enormously challenging and worked very hard at making them vivid and alive. He fully exploited the pre-focused and composed set-up that allowed him to engage the sitter, and expose a sheet of film at the moment that he regarded as revealing. I wonder if 'deadpan' is a cop-out that bypasses the challenge of finding a decisive moment in favor of an easy to accomplish portrait that's on a par with photographing a well illuminated rock, root, and tree.....and I'm a big fan of rocks and trees!
 

mark

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This is an interesting thread. I have often wondered about this look in the work of photographers who are using modern methods. It never seemed necessary.

Jovo, I too have wondered about it being a cop-out. I can see the need for it in the older processes where you are looking at several seconds. On the other hand, it seems like there should be a way to instill some emotion. Since I avoid taking pictures of people I may never find the answers to my questions.

Never mind me I am just rambling.
 

bjorke

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right about here is when someone should cite Richard Avedon's "borrowed dogs" essay, which is available at richardavedon.com
 

tac

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Some thoughts:

It seems to me that, like everything else in photography, deadpan is a tool, to be used when
appropriate as the photographer sees fit. While a 8-pound sledge isn't meant to be subtle like a tacking hammer, they can both do the job more or less effectively. Using one tool for all jobs is probably not a good idea, but people get in ruts, or simply become enamored with a particular tool.

This isn’t necessarily bad, it just gets old after a while. Why can one generally figure out which photographs AA made? Isn't having everything tack-sharp, front-to-back repetitive, thus boring? When a book or movie gets boring, I go find something else to do. Robert Frank was no less influential when photographers became aware of his work. Adams made the Pictorialists look old-fashioned, Frank made Adams look quaint. Things get fixed in time, and we move on- it’s a gradual, continual process.

I'm more impressed with an artist when I see a range of abilities- anyone can throw paint a la Jackson Pollack, I say, paint La Gioconda or Les Demoiselles first, then you have the right in my book to throw paint. So many young artists don't figure this out, thinking 'Hey! I can throw paint too!' Well, no, you can't.

Even, so, some very wonderful music was made by "one-hit-wonder" bands. It's ok to be a one-trick-pony, as long as you do that trick so very well. We don't all have the creativity of the greats- that's what makes them great, but that doesn't detract from our acomplishments, however meager.

And haven't you noticed that music from a given time and place sounds similar? I can instantly tell Big Band from 60's acid rock from Mozart; we are all products of our culture, time and place. There’s nothing wrong with that.

I've seen some painfully beautiful gum prints and platinum prints lately.

So, Deadpan probably is dead, but guess what- in 20 or 30 or 100 years, some young turk will do it again and it'll be the hottest thing down the pike in years. And right now, someone is thinking up something new and startling to astound us all, and it will seem so obvious in ten years.

That's the way it goes.
 

Don Wallace

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I like deadpan myself. Yes, there are lots of books of portraits of deadpan expressions that are boring, but that is because the photographs are boring, not because the subject is deadpan. There is more to a portrait than the expression on the face of the subject.

What bores me the most are the huge polaroids. I have almost never seen one of those 20x24 polaroids that was worth the time. A photograph is not automatically wonderful simply because it is really big and is the only copy.
 

Lee Shively

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I agree with tac: "This isn’t necessarily bad, it just gets old after a while."

Even Avedon's portraits begin to look like satires of themselves after years of seeing the style copied--and I consider Avedon to be one of the masters.

It's sensory overload of an otherwise useful and innovative style.
 

Russ Young

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I lay the blame for deadpan (which I've never favored) squarely at the feet of Richard Avedon, not as inventor but as popularizer. It is difficult to conceive why it is still considered 'radical chic' when the method (I won't consider it an aesthetic, that is a higher level of conceptualization), a la Avedon, is half a century old. It seems particularly dominant in the UK.
Russ
 

zenrhino

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The whole deadpan thing is just huge here in Minneapolis. Alec Soth, Shen Wei and Angela Strassheim have become so popular here that the deadpan narrative portrait is about the only photography to which anyone will pay any attention anymore. I thought for sure this would have passed on to a new trend by now.
 

DBP

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I'm waiting for someone to take a retro approach to it and use Dead Ortho.
 
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Michel Hardy-Vallée

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Aw, Scott, I fear you're deadbeating a deadhorse! We all know that the Aral sea salts are even more deadly than the Dead Sea ones.
 
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