Disclosure

Grimaces of politics

Posted on September 24, 2007 at 9:02 pm by Galina

Portrait is always the sort of intimacy between photographer and model, even if it is spontaneous street or public portrait. With intuitive wisdom photographer tries to reveal most prominent features of model’s character, if possible. Normally 20-30 attempts give one interesting snapshot, and 50 provide sufficient material for normal characteristic portrait.

Fast street portraits look inexpressive and dim, when author has no time to make two-three additional shots. Photographer also becomes very close to model when processing photos at big screen and struggling with inevitable blemishes of skin, which can tell a lot about habits and character of individual.

All personal history of victories, losses, frustrations and joy is recorded in wrinkles and insignificant red spots or pores of face.

Face is complex, tens of small mimic muscles compose picture, some of these muscles managed by most frequent and prolong emotions become immovable with time, froze in expression of bitterness, sarcasm, surprise or carelessness. During last year I exercised photographing public persons and politicians, firstly because I felt genuine interest to them, and secondly because –anybody obtaining fame, power, money, success and publicity, loses right to be yourself or private, and similar to salable bar women- becomes available – during public meetings or election campaigns –for everybody including professional and hobby photographers.

These are some characters I photographed.

Franz Voves. After seeing numerous portraits of Landeshauptmann in local Graz newspapers I was surprised to find him more appealing than his photos. He looked heavy-eyed at his portraits. And in life he was more as cowboy, who probably could be even inventive in bed with his sex-partner. When I clicked with my camera too often and intensive in front of him, he looked down with indignation at my shoes that were cheap and old. He always wares excellent (and perhaps expensive) pair himself.

Alfred Gusenbauer. He gave me idea of being strange. There are certain psychological types whose outer appearance and mimic don’t correspond to their feelings. May be they get used to ware social mask that has chronicle irrelevance with inner life. I could recollect that being in Graz during election campaign, Alfred behaved like mass culture star, and all his smiles and grimaces at the verge of clown escapades looked tense, when in a split of second after demonstrating his wide smile to public, he turned to be serious, and even grave talking privately to Voves.

Wolfgang Schüssel. He looked profound and respectable. And I could realize he spoke well, because indicator of speech clarity and literacy is degree of being understood by foreigners. Clear thoughts produce well articulated speech. That was Wolfgang. But when he sang hymn in the circle of his fans all of them waving Austrian flags, he opened mouth without knowing words and it was very noticeable with 70-210mm lenses. When I worked over his portrait smoothing details I gathered that man with such type of skin can be irritable and hot-tempered sometimes, and also slept bad and got sudden loss of appetite because of moods.

Jörg Haider. He looked good, better than anybody else. Except of the fact that his skin was over burned at that time – by sun or in solarium, and resembled skin of grilled chicken.

Ernest Kaltenegger. He never looked straight in lenses, and as a result gave impression of being not at ease. Numerous portraits of him I made all depicted bottled personality, who on some reasons did not want or could not completely open yourself. He had well shaped head and massive back of the head that he mostly demonstrated to my camera.

Siegfried Nagl. Good-looking dark-haired relatively young man with lovely brown eyes. Has wonderful straight nose. Depicted by many photographers. According to his social position has the air of authority, and consequently almost never looks genuine and original.

[singlepic=50,100,75,,left]Wolfgang Kasic. Don’t know him personally. But manner he moves and talks gives presumption of intellectual flexibility undamaged that is not so widespread phenomenon in local parliament. Though Wolfgang’s voice during parliament debates could be half-tune lower to make it solid. Once being photographed in Landhaus gallery by me - he gave me absolutely sincere smile.

[tags]Street photography, photojournalism, Galina Toktalieva[/tags]

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Gesellschaft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.