F Blog project 08: Face to Face

Photo: Tom Holmlund

"A picture of a person or persons that captures their likeness, especially their face."

Portrait photography has been around since the birth of photography. In the year of 1850 daguerreotype portraits were the talk of the town - over 100 000 of them were taken in Paris alone.

About that time another technical achievement - the wet collodion process was invented - which probably was the reason why Julia Margaret Cameron started to photograph and make portraits.

A quick ride through the history of photography takes us to New York and the 1920s, with Alfred Stieglitz obsessed by the idea of creating the ultimate portrait of Georgia O´Keeffe. Perhaps was he in a way instead portraying himself as O´Keeffe indicates in her introduction to an exhibition with selected portraits (1978).

Nickolas Muray was a master of portraits in colour - you know him from several articles on the blog.

Photo: Per-Arne Andersson

But let’s talk about 2008 and Face-to-Face. We would like to see portraits where "eyes meet", where there is a dialogue between the photographer and the portrayed person. Where you (as the third person involved) will get a feeling of someone looking back at you from the picture. We are not excluding self-portraits - on the contrary.

Photo: Mikael Jansson

You may send series or individual pictures. In this project you don’t have to worry about when the photo is taken. Whether from 1978 or 2008 – it will be fine.