Our first workshop was "The Art and Craft of Portraiture" with Platon.
It was an informative weekend, and a great start to my internship. We started the workshop with some exercises to get us comfortable with looking at a stranger's face. We had to line up in front of someone and stare into each others eyes for about 2 minutes, though it felt like an eternity. This was a very intense exercise to be followed by closing our eyes while someone touched our face, and then we traded and had to do the same. This exercise was a way to explore the face, textures, lines etc, very interesting. Next we did some contour drawings, (which I hadn't done since drawing courses years ago) to do this you draw the face of a person without lifting your pen and without looking at your paper. This is harder to do than you may think, but the outcomes are quite interesting and fun.
It was an informative weekend, and a great start to my internship. We started the workshop with some exercises to get us comfortable with looking at a stranger's face. We had to line up in front of someone and stare into each others eyes for about 2 minutes, though it felt like an eternity. This was a very intense exercise to be followed by closing our eyes while someone touched our face, and then we traded and had to do the same. This exercise was a way to explore the face, textures, lines etc, very interesting. Next we did some contour drawings, (which I hadn't done since drawing courses years ago) to do this you draw the face of a person without lifting your pen and without looking at your paper. This is harder to do than you may think, but the outcomes are quite interesting and fun.
A little background on Platon:
- he has photographed an astounding number of famous personalities, many of which can be seen in his book “Platon’s Republic.”- he is one of the few people to have taken a portrait of Vladimir Putin; this photo awarded him the 2008 World Press Photo Contests’s 1st place.
- he shoots for a range of publications including The New York Times Magazine, Time, Esquire, and Rolling Stone.
- he shot this recent portrait of Michelle Obama for the cover of Time.
The second day was about setting up the scene for a photo shoot and learning about Platon's workflow. He has two assistants and three interns who are there to help him at any given time. Each of us got to practice being the model and being the photographer.
At the end of the day Platon asked us to choose the image we liked best of ourselves and then had us all get in a circle and give our image to the person next to us, rip the image into four pieces and hand it back to the person. He then instructed us to tape our image back together. He said we should keep this image as a reminder that when we get torn apart, we can always put ourselves back together...
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