The Portrait

For my final project, I wanted to work on a series of portraits exploring the emotions behind how a person's body language is captured in a photo. My inspiration for completing this project was how differently people reacted when I asked to take their photos. I know each of the people I photographed personally for this project, but even with our relationships, some were still apprehensive while others eagerly said yes. For this series, I wanted the person to cohesively be part of their environment by using body language to convey different stories. Through this project, I noticed that the less of the person's emotion that I felt that I captured in the image, the more I turned towards focusing on the environment. For each photo I thought about the environment without the person in the shot and the difference between what is perceived. From the angle to the parts of the body visible in the photo, I wanted each one to invoke different emotions from the viewer. People wear their personalities in their facial expressions and body language, unconscious or conscious, and I wanted to capture that in my photographs. Body language is a nonverbal way of communicating, but without being able to see a face or by only catching a face, you may see a different story.