Portraits are always intimate. By definition you are looking to capture something about a person which allows a facet of their personality to be shown and illuminated for others. They aren’t the rawness of street photography, but staged and self-conscious.
So last weekend when I arrived at the location for a concert with Furiosi Affetti (at a baroque monastery in Umbria) and I saw what is, in essence, just a corridor on one of the upper floors, I took the opportunity to offer the musicians the chance to have a portrait shot taken.
It was a bit of a risk - the performers had only a few hours to rehearse and any shots would have to be fitted in around that. In addition, I had very little gear with me, just a couple of lenses, and nothing remotely close to a flash or tripod, just the monopod that I generally use for concert photography. For each photograph I asked the musicians to either play or stand / be seated, depending on the instrument.
Often in portraiture you use some kind of prop or action to try to minimise the consciousness of being photographed and to get a more ‘natural’ picture. For these photographs, each person had their instrument - and it made an intimate activity even more so, as each musician played (often just scales) for the shoot. You could really feel the bond and the strength of the relationship between the performer and their instrument - it is very much a part of them and an extension of who they are.
Using the natural light between about 3pm for the first photograph and about 5.30 for the last, we managed to get around 25 shots per person in the snatched time that we had to work with.
I am choosing to show the monochrome versions of each picture to keep a sense of collection to them - so here are the 5 portraits I have chosen, in the order that they were taken. My thanks to the five people who allowed me into their world and their space to achieve these images.
Enjoy!
(The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that there were in fact 6 musicians. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to move the Spinet out into the corridor for a shot, so I will need to correct this at some point in the future! Sorry, Paolo!)