Photo by Susan Meltzer
WHY PORTRAITS? Photography has been a life-long passion. I had originally planned to fill my time in retirement with street photography. But time and again, I found myself drawn to a subset of that genre, street portraits. Inspired by a viewer's comment, I finally accepted the inevitable and retitled this site, "Portraits with Soul."
Street portraiture is all about stories. People interacting with people is one kind of story, providing the context for many informal portraits. Fleeting moments of mood, or emotion conveyed by facial expression or body language, is another. These two levels often intertwine. For me, they are the soul of art.
Broadly speaking, all the images you see here are "street" portraits even though few were taken on an actual street. Candid, informal and expressive, they earn the rubric of "street" in today’s parlance by their character rather than their location.
For me, photography is a creative journey. It keeps me going in my retirement. I wake up each day looking forward to the ever-fresh challenge of taking a great photo.
WHY BLACK & WHITE? If you dig deeply into this site, you’ll see an evolution from color to black-and-white. As I became more attuned to stories in photographs, I found that color can overwhelm and obscure a story, whereas black-and-white lets it breathe free. Black-and-white also exposes patterns of light and dark, line and shape, that can turn a story into a poem.
INFLUENCES. The following bits of wisdom have influenced my photography, and often my outlook on life, as well:
When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls. -Ted Grant
If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. -Robert Capa
Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive. -Elliott Erwitt
We do not take pictures with our cameras, but with our hearts and minds. -Arnold Newman
Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. -Henri Cartier-Bresson
In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind. -Louis Pasteur
I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. -Joseph Campbell
We can do anything we want; the trick is, it’s usually waiting for us just beyond our comfort zone. -Winston Hendrickson
This above all: to thine own self be true… -Polonious in Shakespeare’s Hamlet