*ooof*: Armitage – Body and Soul

You are really up-to-date, girls, aren’t you? It is quite interesting for me to see how the reaction to my *ooof*s differs from week to week. First of all I have to hand it to you – you are spot on with your comments and I am not talking about your kind compliments, although those are *always* 100% correct, of course. You point out details that I overlook and you create associations and connotations with your input. On a professional level it is also very insightful for me to see which kind of photography works with you as an example audience and which doesn’t. In terms of reaction I have noticed that you are more enthusiastic about (commenting on) recent imagery than older shoots. Images, it seems, in this day and age have a very short “half-time”, especially when it comes to celebrities. You have responded much more enthusiastically to the *ooof*s that refer to recent imagery, whereas last weeks 2008 shot stagnates at 21 lame comments (half of them my own, haha, because I respond to the comments). No accusation – at least not addressed to you, but possibly to myself. But since I am a crowd-pleaser sucker for attention, I take my cue from my findings and return to a recent, new image from our good old friend Robert Ascroft.

Classy in b/w.
Richard Armitage as photographed by Robert Ascroft, 2013
Image via RAnet.com

Once again, in colour
Richard Armitage as photographed by Robert Ascroft, 2013
Image via RAnet.com

Not only had I promised Andarielraine to *ooof* this image, but there is actually a good reason to give this my analytical once-over. Because it comes in two versions – and allows us to take a look at the editing process. As a practitioner, the editing is actually the part of the photographer’s workflow that I like least. One could even say that I actively *dis*like it. I tend to plan and shoot very enthusiastically. But then my energy lags and I have to force myself kick myself up the proverbial lazy arse to even transfer the recently shot images from camera to computer, never mind post-produce them. Ugh. I have a sneaking suspicion that that would not be the case if I had the good fortune of shooting someone as gorgeous as Armitage. I probably couldn’t wait to upload the images onto my PC and drool over the full, high-res images on my screen… We can assume that Ascroft is far more professional than me and probably gets his images edited asap. What’s more, he probably makes use of modern technology and already has an idea of which images he is going to give a post-production treatment *as he shoots*. Yes, that is possible, just by virtue of digital possibilities. Commercial photographers nowadays all shoot “tethered”. That means that their camera is connected to a computer while they shoot, and the images appear on a computer screen in real time – as they shoot. Typically, in a production that is as big as Ascroft’s, the photographer works with an assistant. While the photographer makes the actual images, the assistant sits at the computer and checks the in-coming photos. Ideally, the assistant will give immediate feedback – regarding lighting, exposure, framing – and the photographer reacts. The aim in digital photography is always to get the picture as perfect as possible *in camera*. That is to avoid spending hours digitally correcting or enhancing the images. Thanks to wireless connectivity, there are apps available nowadays that will even connect the tethering programme with an iPad or iPhone, so that the images can even be transmitted to the tablet computer of the art director or client of a shoot who can sit in and check the images as they are being produced.

From the two existing versions of the Armitage portrait we can glean something else. If you compare the two, there are two things in which they differ – the framing and the colour format. We can tell with certainty that the colour version of the image is the original. How can we tell? Because it has a wider frame than the b/w version, i.e. the b/w version must have been cropped from a bigger original. This also provides another interesting insight for non-insiders: The photographer has shot the original portrait in colour. The b/w format was only created in post-production – as professionals change details such as tone, temperature and colour only post-shoot.

But back to the images at hand. Comparing them is an interesting exercise because by all means they should elicit the same response. After all they are identical. But they don’t. Now, it is completely subjective whether you prefer the b/w over the colour version or vice versa. I have heard a few ladies express their preference for the latter in the comments to Lamaruca’s post. Here’s the deal: Colour photography probably speaks to you because it is more life-like. It depicts the sitter *as we see him*, in all his colourful glory, with his healthy skin tone, his blue-grey eyes, his dark brown hair and his dark shirt. We relate to it him because colour is how we see things around us. The hear-and-now is colour. Colour is life. Life is colour. The slice-of-life quality of photography is far more effective when we see it in colour. This is a two-hundredth of a second that was *real*. To all intents and purposes it could’ve been just a second ago. Colour photography anchors a photograph in the present. That is due to the fact that colour photography only came into its own in the 1930s when it became widely accessible. It took, however, another three decades before colour photography crossed the divide into art photography. (Up until the 1960s it was primarily used for commercial/advertising photography but was not seen as a medium for art photography.) Even though it has 50 years under its belt, it is nonetheless the younger sibling of b/w photography and thus has a much more contemporary feel to it than b/w.

B/w portraits, on the other hand, have a timeless quality. They transmit a feeling of classy-ness, of deliberate concentration and aesthetic documentation that colour photography does not quite possess. B/w feels more aesthetic. Because it relies on the contrast of dark and light, it emphasises other aesthetic qualities of the subject than colour, it hones the contrasts/contradictions contained in an image. In this case, for instance, the b/w version focusses our gaze on the contrast between (light) skin and (dark) shirt. It makes the subject stand out against the white background. It zooms in on the dark chest hair against the light skin. Personally, I also find that the b/w version has a much stronger three-dimensionality to it than the colour version. The latter appears flatter than the monochrome version, which places greater emphasis on tiny details: the catch lights in the sitter’s eyes, the appearance of lighter grey hairs in his stubble, the shadow underneath the jaw and to the right of his nose. The downside of this classy-ness is, however, that b/w can occasionally turn the sitters into marble statues rather than represent them as living, breathing humans. It can overaestheticise the subject and distract from the characteristics of human-ness. Thankfully, in this case that does not happen, mainly due to the glittering catch lights in Armitage’s eyes which liven up the face and set it apart from the stonecold, frozen beauty of a marble bust. That is not to say that Armitage *isn’t* eternally beautiful. He is, of course, equally attractive in both photographic incarnations.

I personally am much more emotionally invested with the b/w version of the image. Not only because b/w evokes in me a feeling of nostalgia (an old photographic process) and of appreciation of the tangible craftsmanship of b/w processing (pottering in the darkroom for hours in order to process and print an image – a labour of love that seems to have been forgotten in the age of fleeting digital imagery), but also because of a connotation that I have touched upon earlier on: The sculptural quality of b/w photography hints to the existence of something “sublime” in the depicted. (Servetus was touching on something similar with yesterday’s post on the “beyond” of Armitage.) Just like a marble bust can survive centuries – or forever – the “sublime”, as it is hinted at in classic b/w portraiture, offers us a glimpse of eternity. A b/w image is made “to last”. It is made to document the expression of beauty at a given point in time. The subject thus is transformed into an “ideal” of beauty. A god? A beautiful deity. What could be more fitting for Armitage, whom we adore, not just as a handsome specimen of his gender, but also admire for the characteristics we deduce from his behaviour and interactions? And no, I have no intentions of starting a cult involving Armitage as the worshipped deity, plus I have my personal reservations of the cult of outward beauty, but there is a philosophical dimension to the deliberate reduction of “life” to monochrome. An intentional concentration on the essence of human life – which is actually less about outward appearance but about inner beauty, about “soul”. Soul is the beyond, is the sublime, is the divine, is the universal in us all, no matter what we believe in. It is what beauty and human-ness come down to. B/w photography can capture “soul” like no other medium can. And Armitage possesses soul in spades.

How does this “soul” manifest itself in these images, apart from the fact that b/w emphasises the sublime? Well, now we have truly arrived at the same point where I attempted to throw Servetus off, yesterday. I still have no proper answer, I can only pinpoint where I see the sublime in these images. And that could be something completely different from what you see. Essentially my interpretation of the sublime is informed by my knowledge of Armitage as a person, his representation by Ascroft, and his own interpretation of self *in this particular shot*. And for me it expresses itself in the eyes and the mouth. For me, this Armitage portrait displays the same enigmatic quality that has made Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa the most famous portrait in the world.

And this is where it gets really weird. Because if you compare the Armitage pose with the Da Vinci portrait, you will find that the pose is near-identical. Both subjects are pictured slightly off towards the left, with both head and shoulders at a small angle to the camera. The POV is head-height in both of them. Both have soft lighting with fuzzy shadow, except the light is angled from the right in Armitage’s case, and the left in the painting of Mona Lisa. While the Florentine lady has a subtle smile playing on her lips, Armitage does not smile with his mouth. And while the look in his eyes at first sight may appear challenging, direct, unemotional or possibly even sullen, in my perception it gradually changes into the merest smile. This becomes much clearer when I look at his eyes with peripheral vision. (Try it yourself – focus on his eyes and you will find (from the corner of your eyes) that his mouth curls into a slight smile. When you switch your gaze from the eyes down to the left corner of his mouth, the smile will vanish.)

The ambiguity of Armitage’s expression may account for the extraordinary response I feel to this portrait – and for the feeling that there is something surreal, unworldly, sublime going on here. There is no smile. And yet he smiles at me. Armitage escapes explanation – again. Like a ghost. The only explanation I have for this is his soul. Which communicates to my soul.

All text © Guylty at me + richard armitage, 2013. Please credit when using excerpts and links. Images and video copyrights accrue to their owners.

~ by Guylty on May 14, 2013.