I use the word theorem because I like the idea of a statement that rests on a few simple premises and leads to a conclusion you cannot walk back from. I do not claim to have proved anything for everyone. It is my way of seeing, matured behind the lens and in front of other people’s images, and I write it down because over the years it has become clearer to me.
A portrait does not only show the person in it. It shows, just as precisely, the person looking.
The first premise is black and white. When I remove colour I do not remove reality, I remove noise. Colour tells the story of the shirt, the wall, the season, and it is a beautiful story, but it speaks about things. Grey keeps you on the face, on a gaze, on the shadow falling beside it. I care about what lies beneath the surface, and I reach it by subtraction.
The second premise is essence. A face is not a pose, and not the expression chosen for the occasion either. I do not try to make a person look better than they are, I try not to lose them. What remains, when it works, resembles them more than their own image does, and that is why it feels like touching something deep. I do not know whether it should be called soul. It is the word that comes to me when I look at the shot again, days later.
The third premise is the most delicate one, and it is judgment. A photograph is seen by different people, and each of them lays on it what they carry. In front of the same portrait one person sees melancholy, another gentleness, another strength. It happens with everything we are quick to judge: a lined face, a direct gaze, a body portrayed with respect. Some people recognise beauty in it, others read malice. I know how that photograph was made, and I know the malice was not in the image. Malice does not come from the photograph, it comes from the person looking. Whoever sees evil in an image shows, without realising it, something of what is inside them.
Psychology has a name for this mechanism, projection: we attribute to others, and to images, what we cannot bear to look at in ourselves. I do not turn it into a theory, I only recognise it when it happens. Two people in front of the same photograph can give opposite readings, and the photograph has not changed by a grain. In that case the comment tells you more about the speaker than about the image.
Hence the conclusion. If a photograph is also a mirror of the person looking, then a portrait is not finished when the shot is taken. It is completed in the eyes of whoever meets it, and it moves people precisely because it is not closed: it leaves a space, and in that space everyone puts a piece of themselves. Richard Avedon said his portraits said more about him than about his subjects. I add the third vertex of the triangle: they also speak, and perhaps above all, about the person looking.
I do not draw a rule for others from this, only a habit for myself. When a photograph disturbs me or strikes me, I first ask what it is touching in me, and only then what it says about the image. Judging by appearances is the shortest road, and it usually leads back home. Reading yourself through a face, instead, is a slow and honest way of getting to know yourself.
I do not produce the light, I receive it. The face gives it back, and my task is not to put my hand in front. Out of the dark a shape emerges only if you stay and look long enough, and then you understand where the light comes from.
Giuseppe Irranca
