portraits & transactions
Thursday, March 23, 2006
The agency has recently signed a couple of new photographers that we are particularly enthusiastic about, and today we want to call special attention to Lyndie Benson.
Lyndie has many special qualities, but let’s get these out of the way first: married to jazz saxophonist Kenny G, she lives a life intimately braided into the world of celebrity; she herself has modeled and acted, and she played the Me of the 1997 production Allie & Me (an interesting experiment in improvisational filmmaking featuring Harry Hamlin, Dyan Cannon and others); and her photographic credentials include personal mentoring by the late Herb Ritts and a White House portrait of the late Buddy (the former First Labrador owned by Bill and Hillary Clinton).
All of that makes for a fine lead to a blog post, but none of it will get you signed with a commercial stock photography agency. Great photographs are the key there, and Lyndie’s portraits, especially of children, speak to an interpersonal style of photographic communication that agency folk rarely see in our professional practice.
Most successful lifestyle portraiture derives from a commercial spirit. In such portraiture, the performance of the sitter and the performance of the photographer intersect in a cultural, economic and interpersonal event that might appropriately be called a transaction.
Even when well and profitably executed (or because they are well and profitably executed), these photographs blend seamlessly into the image-saturated mediascape of contemporary life. But every now and then an image comes along that jars photo editors and cultural critics out of postmodern hyperreality and back to the real. They are photographs that are both polished and gritty, somehow Avedonian in their ambition, yet honest in their execution.
Lyndie’s black & white portraits fit that category. They depict photographic encounters that unsettle the hierarchical relationships implied when we conceive of photographs as transactions. Perhaps the photographer is still the agent of these images, the one who takes; but Lyndie’s best portraits depict a style of youth that is fully present to adults and assertive of its own agenda.
A case could be made that such presence is THE style of contemporary American youth, and that self-assured children such as those in Lyndie’s photographs will soon be the standard representation in commercial stock photography.
And at that moment, Lyndie’s portraits will be there to remind us of the kind of great photographs that derive from moments of presence, not streams of data.
posted by fogged @ 10:41 AM
