How Portrait Photography Helped Shed My Inhibitions and Made Me the Person I Am Today
A budding Olympian. A gifted singer and musician with alopecia. A Purple Heart recipient.
These are just some of the people I met during my time in the States as a grad student. And it wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t have a clunky camera strapped around my neck.
I flew from Chennai, India to the Midwest in 2011 to pursue a graduate degree in photojournalism at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia.
As a 23-year-old with no newsroom experience, I was a bundle of nerves, not quite sure what I was getting myself into. The only “job” I ever had was shooting club gigs (and occasionally concerts) on weekends for a now-defunct music blog called Rock and Raga.
After a two-week boot camp, I was in the thick of things. I signed up for three 3-credit courses, one of which was Fundamentals of Photojournalism — the only class my first semester that required me to shoot.
The very first assignment — Breaking the Ice — involved taking photographs of 10 people. The only (and perhaps the biggest) problem was that we (the students) couldn’t photograph any of our acquaintances. Not that it mattered since the only people I knew at that point were my roommate and the professor who taught the class.
We were given a week to complete the assignment. After procrastinating for six whole days, I finally worked up the courage to go meet 10 strangers the morning the assignment was due. I may have done the rounds of a section of the campus and adjacent streets for only about an hour, yet somehow managed to shoot all 10 portraits, and submitted my assignment just in the nick of time.
As disconcerting as the whole experience was, the entire rigmarole of introducing myself to someone, telling them that I’d like to take their picture, and then patiently answering their “why” without breaking my smile or eye contact, surprisingly, came quite naturally to me.
And that’s the story of how I ended up making my first set of portraits in the U.S. — back then, I had no idea that this genre of photography would soon become my calling card.
A brief history of portrait photography
Did you know the first-ever portrait, a self-portrait at that, was taken in 1839 by a Robert Cornelius, outside his family’s chandelier store?
In case you’re wondering, no Mr. Cornelius wasn’t in a bad mood (or maybe he was!?!) when he took his selfie, technically called a daguerreotype. The photographic process required Mr. Cornelius to hold still for 10 to 15 minutes! Hence, the grim expression. Just so you know, it’s humanly impossible to hold a smile for even a minute without your jaw hurting. Believe me, I’ve tried it.
Also, back in the day, smiling in a portrait was at odds with the prevailing cultural norms and attitudes.
Anyway, the daguerreotype made way for the ambrotype around a decade later owing to its practicality — faster, less expensive, and better quality. It’s only fitting that we take a moment to remember the late English sculptor Frederick Scott Archer here. Thanks to Mr. Archer’s wet collodion process, which brought down the exposure time for ambrotypes and later tintypes to just 2–3 seconds, photography replaced painting as the go-to method for capturing a person’s true likeness, at last, in the mid-1800s.
In 1871, with the invention of dry plates, which was 60 times more sensitive to light than collodion plates, and the emergence of the cheap, hand-held Kodak camera in 1888, people finally began warming up to the idea of letting their guard down in photographs, thanks to faster shutter speeds.
My first brush with studio portraiture
In my second semester, the Advanced Techniques in Photojournalism course allowed me to play around with studio equipment for the very first time in my life.
For the first assignment, we were randomly paired with a classmate and asked to take each other’s portraits in the studio. I was paired with Angelina Owino, an exchange student from Denmark.
My hour-long portrait session with Angelina resulted in this picture.
Going in, I was freaking out a little because of all the math associated with artificial lighting but my fears soon gave way to curiosity and enthusiasm, and I had a ball working in the studio.
I felt like I was home.
Soon my professor, David Rees, after noticing my penchant for artificially-lit portraiture, loaned me a portable lighting kit that looked like a prop straight out of a ’70s sci-fi movie. I started lugging the heavy gear everywhere I went to shoot. It wasn’t long before I started shooting portraits for almost all my class (and personal) assignments.
Around the same time, I also took up a fine art photography class. It not only allowed me to dabble in darkroom processing and printing but also introduced me to square format photography. I was like a kid with two new toys — a vintage lighting kit and a second-hand twin-lens reflex camera (TLR) that I’d bought the following semester — and I couldn’t get enough of either of them.
My breakout assignment
In 2012, I got a chance to be part of the Missouri Photo Workshop — the oldest photography workshop in the world. This may sound like a cliché but I came of age as a photographer during the week-long workshop, held in a small Missouri town called Troy.
I documented the life of a retired high school teacher who worked part-time as the groundskeeper of Troy Cemetery. Those few days I spent shadowing him taught me quite a few valuable life lessons but my most important learning was that photography can and should be a collaborative process.
The quote by Eve Arnold, the first female photographer to be inducted into Magnum Photos, “If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument,” which I chanced upon around the same time became my life’s motto.
Once I was back in Columbia, I felt a lot more unburdened as a photographer, and when it was time to shoot one of my most important assignments that semester I decided to go old school.
I was enrolled in a class called Staff Photojournalism and as the name suggests I had to don the staff photographer hat two days a week for the famed Columbia Missourian, Columbia’s local newspaper (run almost entirely by MU’s journalism students). It was election season and we had to follow a local candidate on their campaign trail and put together a photo story about them.
If you’re thinking: “What a great opportunity for a budding photojournalist to get his feet wet in American politics?” Think again! I was not only apolitical but also clueless about U.S. politics at the time. So I got a primer on the subject from my editor, Ben Zack, who was doing his bachelor’s at the time. And before I knew it, I found myself at a political convention praying to get an audience with two Libertarians who were scheduled to speak at the gathering.
In hindsight, the odds of me meeting with even one of them were pretty much zero.
I guess the photo gods took pity on me and I miraculously got hold of both of them. After a little chit-chat, I was giving them directions on how to pose for my portrait series on third party candidates. And guess what — I was shooting with my trusty TLR!
For the other four portraits, I had to convince my editor to give me a ride to the Missouri State Capitol at Jeff City; showed up unannounced at a candidate’s apartment, was shooed away, and then returned another day to try my luck once again; and took an early morning bus to Kansas City to meet with a bunch of candidates who were just as perplexed as I was.
As you can imagine, I was overwhelmed by all these impromptu meet and greets. But when the pictures were finally published in the newspaper, I was completely surprised by the overwhelmingly positive response this body of work got from one and all. The story even received a standing ovation from the entire newsroom that morning!
But more than the adulation, the fact that these candidates, older and much wiser than me, were willing to engage in a frank discussion about their belief systems with me — a total stranger — really touched me. And if you ask me, it’s encounters like these that make portrait photography truly stand out from the other genres.
The portrait juggernaut comes to a halt
My love of portraiture reached an all-time high after that incredible (or should I say accidental?) success.
Another noteworthy assignment that earned me plaudits that semester was the series of (multi-platform) stories, “Against the Odds.” It was my first time working in a group comprising more than two dozen students and a faculty member. The project told stories of “courage and perseverance using text, photography, and video.” I still consider the set of square portraits I shot for this project to be my finest body of work to date.
I had no classes during my third and final year at the J-school, but I did get to intern with the university’s Joint Office of Strategic Communications and Marketing. Thanks to the cooperation and support of Shane Epping, a senior photographer (and my immediate boss) there, I was given free rein to explore the topics I fancied ranging from what it’s like being Black in America to the beautiful bond that college roommates share. And you guessed it right — all of these pitches took shape as a portrait series.
After graduating in 2014, I was back in Chennai and continued to bank on a combination of portraiture and reportage photography to tell human stories. In the process, I saw first-hand how embodying Ms. Arnold’s quote about putting people first opened doors for me no matter where I was and who I was with. As a result, I realized my long-time dream of documenting the life of circus performers.
But all good things eventually come to an end, and in 2017 I swapped my camera for a pen. Although writing is my full-time profession now, I’ll always be a (portrait) photographer at heart, and nothing will ever change that.
All photographs by the author, unless otherwise credited.
