ABSTRACT

A Study on Portrait Photography of Jazz Artists


Hwang. HeeChul
Advisor : Prof. Lim. Jae-Moon
Department of Photography
Graduate School of Gwangju University

Portraits had held a huge position in the field of paintings before the invention of photography. In the latter part of the 18th century, individual people had their portraits painted actively in the West with new mechanical devices designed to help artists paint portraits of the new emerging class in an easier and faster way. Photographs were used to highlight more realistic aspects in portraits. In its early days, portrait photography was developed to depict the characteristics of a person based on face descriptions and natural and artificial features in the background.
Portrait photography holds a big place for reflecting the cultural values of the times. Human desire will make people keep wanting to record themselves. Cultural eras will write a new history of portrait photography to create a new future culture. It is evident that efforts have long been made to depict human faces across all the genres of art including paintings. Portraits of many figures found in the history of art display an artistic aspect of capturing and recording the internality of a face.
This study set out to investigate masters of portrait photography including August Sander, who took only portrait pictures of the entire German people and tried to figure out the human character in the huge social structure, Felix Nadar, who showed what oil portraits achieved with photography based on his unique sense, and Yousuf Karsh, who put an emphasis on the inner expressions of people and locational relations between the face and hands and thus made sharpness and black & white prominent clearly in his works.
The present study presented the investigator''s works consisting of typical photographs in the ways that he planned and worked for two years. There were total 15 works expressing the periodic backgrounds of jazz musicians in the 19th century in modern portrait photography.
In the preliminary shooting session, the investigator discovered the individuality of each artist through their facial expressions and gestures. Only black jazz musicians were selected and photographed in a shooting space inside a music hall to ensure their clearer expressions in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz at the end of the 19th century. The works reflected the culture of the period and consisted of black and white photographs that were typical photographs. Their actual print size was 100cm x 120cm to present bigger images than the old portrait photography. The inner expressions and periodic backgrounds found in the faces of the artists were instantly captured in big portrait photographs so that viewers could see, feel, and think. That is, the snapshot technique was avoided with the overlapping and immobility of figures in the white background excluded to express the artists individually. Their upper bodies were put in the works to naturally pursue their actual performance scenes rather than the typical poses in portrait photography. The investigator chose his atelier instead of streets and performance halls to block attention from the outside and help the artists immersed further with their vision and hearing unstimulated.
In the investigator''s portrait photography, freedom of expression was oriented toward the performance and communication with the world of the jazz artists, which means that the expression of their facial expressions during their performance makes a piece of art for the photographer and jazz artists and is the starting point of portrait photography as a creation for jazz artists.