The Wide Angle Portrait

It’s a generally held truism that portrait photography requires a short telephoto lens to get the best results. We even tend to refer to 85mm lenses as ‘portrait lenses’ and the 50mm as a ‘poor man’s portrait lens on APS-C cameras (coming out to a 75mm focal length equivalent on a Full Frame camera). I strongly suspect that the travel photography out of covers like the National Geographic in the 80s, along with the Time/Life magazines is part of the reason we generally reach for the short telephoto when we photograph people.

There’s a good reason for this too. The foreshortening effect of a short to moderate telephoto does wonders for the contours of the face. The subject’s nose isn’t as pronounced. The chin neither protrudes nor recedes, while the eyes seem to be perceptually more balanced with the rest of the face. Essentially what the short telephoto does is it flattens the features of the face ever so slightly while simultaneously separating the person's face from the background. Effectively it’s a more pleasing, almost idealized presentation to the viewer. Then there’s the inclination to fill the frame with the subjects face so that you cannot help but stare into their eyes.

Just because I have a penchant for the wide angle portrait doesn't mean that I won't also shoot tighter portraits as in this image of a Sami herder in the northern most region of Norway.

The German photographer Martin Schoeller uses the effects of a slightly longer lens to fantastic effect with his series of portraits shot around the world. His preferred setup for the particular project that has made him famous is a Mamiya 6x7 film camera with a 140mm lens. On a full-frame camera that lens has the equivalent of just below 70mm focal length on a ‘full-frame’ (aka 35mm) camera. There is less of a foreshortening effect than with a longer lens like the 85mm, but there is still enough that the face is able to fill the frame without being distorted. What is interesting with his portrait series is that the roughly 68mm equivalent does add a touch of distortion to his subjects faces’. Enough to just give the impression of sitting uncomfortably close to the viewer. When looking at Steve McCurry’s close-up portraits of people from the around the world, the focal length is usually greater than 85mm and the result is that the subject appears further away, outside of the viewer’s comfort zone.

A second example of a tighter image shot with a telephoto lens while on assignment for an agricultural NGO in South Africa. The shot has very little context in which to tell a story apart from the 'props' in the image itself.

Similarly the portrait of a Maasai man in Kenya has little 'story' apart from our received knowledge of his heritage courtesy of his clothing and attire.

I’m going to hone in on Steve McCurry’s portrait style as I suspect that it has informed, or at the very least influenced a generation of photographers. There is a particular look to his tight portraiture that makes them instantly recognizable. I even remember reading articles when I was starting out my journey into photography in the late 90’s that gave advice on how to create images like his. Even travel books produced by Lonely Planet gave compositional advice to create these types of travel portraits. The general trope is fairly simple…longish lens, widish aperture (but not wide open as you need enough depth of field on the face itself) to create separation from the background, and get the subject to the look directly into the camera’s lens. For the most part the light is short (highlight on the cheek facing away from the camera) or soft overhead and slightly frontal. In fact, the soft overhead/frontal is almost shadowless most of the time. In discussing his famous Afghan girl portrait, he has even mentioned that he had her move to the side of a tent where she was in shade (and the colour of the tent would create simultaneous contrast with her shawl).

I have been unashamedly influenced by the generation of photographers from National Geographic that were shooting at the same time as Steve McCurry. It’s only recently that I realised how different some of these other photographers approaches were to portraiture. In particular I was drawn to images by William Albert Allard, Sam Abell, Jodi Cobb and David Alan Harvey. One of the things I noticed was that unlike the well-heeled trope of portraiture with a short-telephoto, they tended towards portraiture with a wider lens. Something more like a 35mm on a full-frame camera.

What is immediately apparent with these portraits is that there is context to the scene. There is a relationship between the subject and their surroundings, even when the camera is pushed in close to the subject. Even when the photographer is seemingly uncomfortably close to the person being photographed, the viewer has an awareness of the subject’s surroundings. What makes Martin Schoeller’s and Steve McCurry’s intimate portraits intriguing is that they are portraits almost devoid of context. Even with the amazing locations that McCurry shoots in, the portraits only bear small colourful glimpses of the subject’s environment. The portraits by the likes of Jodi Cobb and David Alan Harvey are all about the context.

Probably an overused example of a composition where I create a kind of visual tension between the subject and his environment through 'counter-pull'

For me, the wider angle glass is a story-telling lens. I am aware of the criticism of an image telling a story (best verbalised by David Horn in ‘On Looking at Photographs'); the idea being that an image able to tell a story is a load of bunkum and that a photograph always needs accompanying text if it is to be anything more than an aesthetic interpretation. However, images can convey fragments of a story, even if the meaning isn’t concrete and requires some interpretive guesswork on the part of the viewer. Tight portraits are contextually starved. Even Steve McCurry’s famous portrait mentioned above requires some text in order to fully understand it. It is immediately visually arresting, but it doesn’t tell a story until the viewer reads the byline (and in recent years it’s become apparent that the story itself is contested). Wide angles, as distorting as they can visually be, lend more elements to the picture frame with which the viewer is able to piece together some form of narrative.

So for this reason I seem to find myself gravitating towards wider lenses when I am on assignment or even just shooting personal work. In particular I have discovered a large number of my portraits of people are shot either with a 16-35mm lens, or a 40mm f2 lens. Yes, I have portraits shot with my 70-200mm lens as well, but the images that grab viewer’s attention tend to be the wider lens shots, and ones which indicate some form of context.

The wider lens (a 24mm in this instance) allows for far more story-telling elements to be included in the frame. Even if we don't have a full narrative, there is more information with which to decode the image.

Compositionally Speaking

Going through my library of images I noticed that there are two particular compositional forms that I seem to fall back on regularly. This is while I am getting in close mind you. The first is to create a dominant central composition. This does the same thing as the tight portrait with a longer lens in that it forces the viewer to contemplate the person being photographed before anything else. I particularly like the 16:9 or slight panoramic composition here as it also forces the awareness of the wider field of view. The viewer is compelled to become aware of the contextual space that the person being photographed occupies. This is the case even if the background is out of focus.

The central placement of the individual by visual necessity places them as the central subject of the image. The contextual background informs us about the subject, but it doesn’t necessarily create a relationship, visual or real, with the background per se. By placing the person in the Frame off centre though, the opportunity to create a relationship with the contextual background becomes more apparent.

I first came across this line of thought reading Ernest Watson’s book on ‘Composition in Landscape and Still Life’. A primer text for painters, not photographers. In one chapter he describes at length the concept of counter-pull; essentially two objects or shapes inside the frame that create tension between the two by visually pulling apart (usually to the left and right of the frame). A simple way of doing this is by imagining the rule-of-thirds line drawn over an image and having two dominant elements in the frame aligned with the vertical thirds, but leaning outwards towards the frame’s border.

This is where the wide angle as a portrait lens shines. Incorporating a background into the frame and compositionally aligning it to create a visual tension between the person in the photograph and the environment that they are in automatically hints toward a visual narrative. Even when that person is simply looking at the camera, we are able to infer more about them and their situation than a simply study of the face isolated from its environment through the use of a longer telephoto.

My own particular background in anthropology probably also steers me toward the wide angle lens as an optic through which to view and photograph the people that I come across. To me there is a stronger sense of intimacy with the wider angle lens. There is more of that feeling of being in the same personal space as the person that you are photographing. It gives the viewer the feeling of being a part of the scene. It is one of the reasons why the wide angle lens is so important for documentary work as it places the viewer ‘there’ with you. It makes the subject real. The wide angle as a portrait lens tells a story whereas the longer lens tends to paint a picture, a beautiful one at that, but one which occasionally lacks that sense of narrative.