My love for portraits runs deep. The first image of mine to recieve any sort of award was a portrait, and in fact, that image was the first portrait I ever took in a studio environment. Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to figure out the right way to take a portrait. I’ve always been uncomfortable giving directions to my subjects while I’m behind the camera, and typically all I say is, “Just think about how you feel right now.” The end result is a portrait that documents just that, how the subject felt at that moment in time, instead of a stilted example of how I wanted them to look. It also helps to photograph creatures without the capacity to understand spoken language. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I don’t really do color for portraits. It’s not based on a principle or anything, I just haven’t really taken a portrait on color that spoke to me. I’m sure one will come around someday.

I take enough portraits that one might incorrectly categorize me as a portrait photographer. And, here, I will get into my extremely tired and melodramatic tirade on how I feel the divisions of photographic genres are not only unimportant, but dangerous to the every-day artist. To me, the only distinction necessary is the one between the photographer and the average picture-taker. I am a photographer, which means I am an artist, and that is all! I will not be boxing myself into a silly genre any time soon, thank you very much!

I’m reading that back now, and holy shit, do I sound pretentious. Can you tell I shoot film?

-LAD