I photographed a young woman last Friday, for an assignment, whom two years before, when she was 21, was standing at a bus stop with her best friend waiting to go to a hen do.
Until a boy racer hit her and her friend at 101 mph - changing her life forever.
Her friend was killed and she left in a coma for 6 weeks, only then finding out what had happened on that night and that her friend was gone.
How do you put all of that into a photograph?
So much of what makes a photograph exists outside of the frame.
It exists in the dialogues and interchanges between subject and photographer; which will never be known, as much as it does within the mind of the viewer.
And it exists within the directions passed down from picture editor to photographer and then to the subject as much as it is within the story which is shared with the photograph.
And so I'm never really sure what portraits reveal, or what they tell us about the people within the frame.
Perhaps then all that we can do is to reveal some illusion of humanity, engender a connection, a bridge if you will, between the subject and viewer, so that they will be seen as 'real people' and not just the light on surface which the photograph has recorded and the eye has observed.
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