Portraits | Raphael Shevelev Ideas in Photography

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Polygamy

Mike

Vasudha and Saraswati

The Poet's Right Brain

Miriam At 100 - The Melody Continues

Maestro Liebling and the Cacophony of Modern Art

Thakurani Rashmi Singh

Tree of Enlightenment

Dancer in the Mission

Christopher's Questions

At Rest

The Author and Her Words

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Gallery Statement

In the same way that fine photography is usually more than the mere recording of objects and events, great photographic portraiture is vastly more than the physiognomic representation of face and form.

In every truly exceptional portrait is evidence of an intellectual and emotional passage between the photographer and the subject, and often also between the subject and his or her animate and inanimate environment.

The spectrum of remarkable portraiture - from the monumental studies of Karsh to the arresting "environmental portraiture" of Arnold Newman - is testament to the complexity of the relationship between portraitist and subject.

At the opposite end of these psychologically and technically excellent human-to-human efforts are all those commercial and amateur portraitists of the comb-your-hair-moisten-your-lips-and-smile-happily types in whom lives the passion to portray all humankind as felicitously lobotomized.

I choose to do portraits only of people I have come to know well, acquiring a sense of their moods and expressions, as well as their relationship with their physical and intellectual environment. Some of these portraits conform to my sense of reality, others are more metaphoric.

Beside creating likeness, portraiture attempts to express character, the setting in which the subject is portrayed, and the relationship between subject and portraitist, all in the language of design.

The reasons for our passion to create human likenesses are complex and touch the very reasons for, and attempts to, understand our existence, largely because we are seeking something beyond likeness itself.

Fortunately, that search is endless.