If I hear ‘portrait’ I think of a face. I think about a person being portrayed, in clothing or without, in their environment, on the street or in a studio. Recently I have been thinking about what it means to photograph somebody. Historically, if you wanted to have a portrait of yourself, you would have a painter paint you, that was before the invention of the daguerreotype. Even then, you would need wealth in order to be depicted. Eventually, having a portrait of yourself, or a loved one became more accessible, gradually the photographic portrait was commonly used as a memory and a cherished picture. Families and individuals would go to photography studios and be mechanically reproduced into an object they could take home or carry around with them. This was never completely natural.

In my project ‘ANNA’, I repeatedly and obsessively photographed my mother, staging her in the landscape or in rooms where we stayed. Eventually, she grew weary of being photographed and I was prompted to think of an alternative strategy: how else can I portray her without crossing her boundary? When she visited me, I realized that I had been so fixated on taking her portrait, that I had missed the details. This wasn’t necessary for the project at the time, but now when we spend time together, I focus the lens not on her facial expression, but on other details, for example, her hands as she scribbles notes, or her feet as she washes them before bed. This remains to be a portrayal and in fact exposes more natural aspects of her as a person opposed to a distant figure in a photograph. 

So when you think about somebody and say, ‘hey, can I take your portrait?’ – linger on other parts of the person, before going straight to the face, because a portrait is so much more than what we often think of.