Is Deadpan Dead?

TheFlyingCamera said:

I'd say that only some of those are really "deadpan". I'm not terribly fond of the series - I don't like the photographer's lighting style. On a separate but not entirely unrelated note, flipping through that gallery on Flickr was particularly jarring because of the ads inserted every five or six images, because the ads were so stylistically different from the photos in the series.

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jnanian said:

i didn't scroll through every image, didn't find anything jarring or the ads obtrusive, and i liked what i saw.
it was nice to see straight forward portraits, some expressionless + deaapan some not
in color without some sort of veil of attempting to claim they are the reincarnation of dead photographer's /schtick,
or hope some 19th century style / process might make terrible photographs OK because of some "process"
they are just unassuming portraits ... which is nice

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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.

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Curt said:

I read that his portrait of Winston Churchill was the result of taking the picture while taking the cigar out of his mouth.

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TheFlyingCamera said:

The picture was taken after, and he had only a split second to grab that shot, all the more challenging given he was shooting an 8x10. I heard that Churchill forgave him for it when he realized why Karsh was doing it, and that he got an iconic image as a result. But he had Churchill for all of five minutes or so between the two chambers of the houses of Parliament in Ottawa as he was going from one house to the other to speak.

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MattKing said:

He actually shot two - the other one has Churchill smiling.

Karsh did a wonderful job describing how everything happened when I saw him speak in the 1970s.

Somewhere I have a grainy, blurred 35mm negative with Karsh winking at me as I took his photograph at that speaking engagement - I had no flash, and there was just no light!

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