Environmental Portraiture

A Complete Guide to the Portrait Photographer's Most Powerful Imaging Tool

Jim Cornfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317386476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

This unique book is a photographer's guide to the powerful medium of the environmental portrait. It explores in lucid detail the many "moving parts" of this imaging style, including the techniques and creative processes that drive some of this genre's finest contemporary practitioners.

In Environmental Portraiture, author Jim Cornfield puts his readers behind the viewfinder to help them successfully master what he calls "the portrait photographer's most high-powered tool." In a series of detailed tutorial chapters and study models, Cornfield unpacks every practical aspect of the environmental portrait scenario, including research, location scouting, lighting interior and exterior environments, props and wardrobe, lens selection, composition, color, and after-capture.

Along with this wealth of comprehensive nuts-and-bolts information, the book probes the deep structure of environmental portraiture—the blend of a sitter's backstory with the meaningful visual clues in their surroundings. He introduces such concepts as " portraitcraft, " "cognitive weight, " and "the ideas and emotions quotient, " among the many dimensions of an environmental portrait that create eye-opening revelations about the person in front of your lens.

A separate section of the book is devoted to a prestigious roster of contemporary environmental portraitists, specifically recruited for this book to explore in-depth selected samples from their diverse portfolios. They bring with them a score of insights, tips and fascinating anecdotes that demonstrate their individualized approaches to this versatile branch of the photographer's craft.

Written for professionals, amateurs and serious students of photography, this book is both a guide and inspiration to creating powerful, communicative environmental portraiture.

PART I
Fundamentals

1
DISCOVERING THE ENVIRONMENTAL PORTRAIT

A MEMOIR

Before we launch into the deep structure of this imaging style, I want to share with you the following personal tale of discovery. It demonstrates how affecting the backstory to an Environmental Portrait can be—not only to the viewers of such an image, but also to the person who shot the picture. The details of this particular scenario coalesced as an important juncture in my journey as a photographer. I include it here principally to set the stage for the instructive environmental portrait scenarios you’ll encounter throughout the rest of this book.

DEATH ON A SUMMER NIGHT

I can trace my most vivid—and most traumatic—lesson in the art of the Environmental Portrait to two memorable shooting assignments early in my career. Both, by coincidence, were anchored in the same celebrated murder case in Los Angeles, and, though neither of the subjects was a principal in this crime, they were each crucial supporting players in the drama that it spawned.

Here is the dark tale that drove this pair of images and my personal memoir of its aftermath. For anyone old enough to have seen it play out in real time, this recap will no doubt stir some gruesome memories. Chances are good you’ve read about it, or more recently, seen it portrayed in a motion picture. If it’s new to you, be forewarned—this is a grim tale. But I don’t revisit it here for its shock value. It’s also a persuasive demonstration of how an Environmental Portrait is as much about the vagaries of human behavior as it is about photography.

In August, 1969, four members of a deadly Southern California Cult, on the orders of their now infamous self-anointed Svengali, Charles Manson, broke into the suburban Benedict Canyon home of film director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate, and savagely massacred Tate, 8-months pregnant, and four of her friends. Polanski was on location in Europe at the time.

Press accounts almost immediately began piling one shocking detail on top of another. There were lurid theories of a botched drug deal or a ritual sex orgy that collapsed into lunacy, and relentless speculation about what sort of monsters could be responsible for a bloodbath that left such hideous knife and gunshot wounds and the sickening evidence of the killers’ struggles to subdue their victims. All of this was made even more appalling 24 hours later by the revelation of two more brutal, almost carbon copy murders that left a Los Angeles businessman and his wife—Leno and Rosemary Labianca—dead in their Los Feliz home. Along with nearly everyone else in the country, I was transfixed by this brief, horrific crime spree. It started with the first TV news cut-ins, and lasted through the dramatic second act, five months later, when the killers were run to ground at a dusty cowboy movie set in the Mojave desert.

CORONER TO THE STARS

In the wake of these crimes, as the trial of Charles Manson and his disciples stretched to a two-year legal drama, an almost cinematic cast of players was introduced in the media—Manson himself, his zombie-like acolytes, stalwart district attorney, Vince Bugliosi. One of the actors was already quite familiar to the public. He was Thomas T. Noguchi, the controversial chief medical examiner of Los Angeles county.

As the company town for the motion picture business, LA inevitably comes under the beam of its own klieg lights when some tabloid grade Hollywood celebrity meets with a violent or otherwise untimely demise. Movie stars being a kind of artificial royalty in our culture, as soon as a murder or suicide lurches into their glamorous orbit, the rest of us seem to fall into a collective swoon that mixes shock with morbid fascination. One person always ready with answers was Thomas Noguchi, who headed the LA Morgue from 1968 to 1983. He famously presided over post-mortem investigations that drew worldwide attention—Marilyn Monroe, John Belushi, Natalie Wood, William Holden, Freddie Prinze, Janis Joplin, and more. When Senator Robert F. Kennedy died in Los Angeles from an assassin’s bullet, the details of the fatal wound were announced to the world, under the glare of television lights, by Dr. Noguchi.

The familiarity which Los Angeles’ Chief Medical Examiner (M.E.) affected with reporters and photographers during his tenure raised a few eyebrows among the public and his colleagues in the LA medical establishment. Many doctors felt he was too much of a showman who relished his nickname, “coroner to the stars,” and who had a hair trigger impulse to throw a press conference whenever a newsworthy corpse wound up on his autopsy table. He had also acquired a reputation for often cringeworthy black humor, as when he referred to his professional specialty as “horizontal medicine.”

The resentment against Thomas Noguchi was persistent, but it couldn’t diminish the reality that he was, by every standard, a brilliant forensic pathologist—in fact, among the best in the world. He was in constant demand as a consultant to medical examiners in other cities in the US and overseas. His personal quirks aside, he pursued his overcrowded case load with passion and ingenuity.

THE SHOOT

I met Dr. Noguchi when I was assigned to photograph him for a New York book publisher. This was about five years post-Manson, and the writer on this project had homed in on the M.E.’s workup of those particular murders as a model of Noguchi’s meticulous process. I had frontloaded this shoot with my own preliminary research, so I knew the coroner’s reputation and the details of his more prominent cases. My initial idea for the shot was to make a straightforward location portrait—a doctor in his workplace—with little thought at the time to the emotional gravity of this workplace.

On a spring morning Noguchi greeted me in the drab, fluorescent-lighted hallway of the County Medical Examiner’s headquarters in downtown LA. He said he’d prefer to do this shot in his paneled office, seated at his desk, in suit and tie—clearly an homage to his managerial standing in the law enforcement/criminal justice system. I was thinking more along the lines of surgical scrubs or a lab coat, surrounded by scientific paraphernalia or autopsy tables, but I went along with the corporate look initially to satisfy his professional vanity. We’d have time later for shots that were a little more edgy. I set up an electronic flash and umbrella reflector and we went through the familiar motions of an executive portrait session. Occasionally, he would turn to chat with the writer, who needed to ask a few questions throughout this sitting.

Sometimes in such a situation, working with a journalist alongside, the chance to eavesdrop can add dimension to your knowledge of the subject, and maybe conjure up an idea for improvising a shot that’s not yet on your list. This particular conversation did both, as it moved into the graphic details of Tate-LaBianca. Imaginings of beautiful Sharon Tate and her dead companions seemed to pervade the room. Noguchi recounted his trial testimony about the well-publicized brutality at these murder scenes—random knife slashes and crushing blows, the word “war” carved into the skin of one victim. Some of these revelations had eluded the press coverage, and their horror was staggering. It was impossible to imagine what need a ghastly crime like this could have satisfied in the demented minds of these perpetrators.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS

When we finished the first portrait setup, Noguchi got up from his desk, and produced a couple of manila folders from a file drawer. There were crime scene and autopsy photographs, raw and chilling. I barely glanced at each shot for a couple of seconds and finally looked away completely. It felt like the worst kind of voyeurism to be privy to horrors like these. But it was also at that moment that I began to understand the world Dr. Noguchi inhabited. It was the world of science and forensics, cold and impersonal—the silent, awful testimonials of the dead.

An autopsy is, in effect, a wordless conversation in which a medical examiner asks of the lifeless body laid out on his/her table: “tell me what happened to you.” To understand the awful intimacy of this relationship, you have only to hear recitations of post-mortem evidence, such as Noguchi’s monologue before the jury, or to examine the pictures I had just seen. In homicide cases, such evidence comprises the uncomfortable truths that are often central to the process of bringing a murderer to justice. As my morning with Noguchi progressed, his ardent commitment to this process became more and more evident.

We left the office for a brief location scout into the business end of the morgue. There were cubicles for things such as labwork, x-rays, a newly acquired electronic microscope, and central to it all, a spacious, no-nonsense operating room. As you’d expect, it was dominated by a stark arrangement of metal autopsy tables. There were wheeled carts and Mayo Instrument Stands displaying the arcane hand tools of a coroner’s trade. For propriety, most of the deceased who were slated for examination that morning were tucked away behind the steel doors of a refrigerated storage vault that dominated one wall. A few bodies still occupied gurneys that were pushed to the sides of the room. Their vague silhouettes were barely discernible through the thick translucent plastic sheeting.

As we looked around Noguchi’s stark, antiseptic realm I learned that, early in his tenure, he had transformed a notoriously antiquated county morgue into a state-of-the-art facility. He’d been zealous about promoting needed improvements through the bureaucratic approval machinery. At one point, he confided to us that his much maligned showmanship was in fact a deliberate tool to shine a spotlight onto this misunderstood niche in LA’s law enforcement culture. Public attention spurred increases in funding from the county. Even when the purse strings were finally drawn completely closed, Noguchi had put up his own personal funds to pay for that electron microscope. It was the department’s most important technological upgrade, ever. When I heard this, the coroner’s stock took a dramatic leap upward for me.

Amazed by this bit of information and what it revealed about Thomas Noguchi’s commitment to his work, I did a few images of him seated at the control panel of this complicated instrument. But I still wanted a more definitive hero shot from this take, and I found myself glancing repeatedly at that austere metal vault, with its silent tales of mayhem locked inside. Mortuaries or other institutions would eventually retrieve the occupants for their last journeys. For now, they were wards of Los Angeles County, under the protection of this dedicated, eccentric doctor. That mental image conjured up the idea for my next photograph. I positioned Noguchi in front of the vault doors and placed my flash/umbrella combination high and tilting downward for a bit of drama lighting. My keeper image from this shoot began falling into place. It was a deceptively simple composition, but true to the much more complicated vision I was formulating of Thomas Noguchi—first, as the self-assured professional, undeniably in charge here, and equally important, though less obvious, as the last meaningful human contact that the people behind those doors would ever have. I had begun to fathom the doctor’s proprietary link to the deceased. To him, they were more than corpses—they were witnesses, keepers of those uncomfortable truths he coaxed from them during that final “conversation” in his autopsy suite.

To create a visual narrative around this idea I let the ominous gray steel behind the subject suggest that what lay behind those heavy doors was something profoundly serious. The cold, institutional ambience the metal surface evoked was supported by bulky stainless steel latches, stenciled identification numbers, even a homely industrial floor drain. Two other important elements shaped the rest of the message—the doctor’s white labcoat, which helps identify him and separates him from the subdued midtones of the background, and secondly, the picture’s very deliberate symmetry, with the subject squarely in the center of the frame. It plainly asserts who the central figure is in the somber, complex world of Thomas Noguchi.

As my first serious attempt at an Environmental Portrait, this shoot demonstrated to me a hallmark of a well-executed Environmental Portrait: Inanimate shapes and objects…have the power to summon up intangibles, to stimulate imagination, invoke mood, and conjure abstract notions that amplify our impressions of the person in our frame. An Environmental Portrait is clearly more than the sum of its parts.

As my first serious attempt at an Environmental Portrait, this shoot demonstrated to me something I now understand as a hallmark of a well-executed Environmental Portrait: inanimate shapes and objects—background details like these imposing steel doors—can engage more subjective channels of perception beyond just hard empirical facts about a subject. They have the power to summon up intangibles, to stimulate imagination, invoke mood, and conjure abstract notions that amplify our impressions of the person in our frame. An Environmental Portrait is clearly more than the sum of its parts.

THE COMPA...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface: Beyond the Mask
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I FUNDAMENTALS
• PART II THE ENVIRONMENTAL PORTRAIT IN THE REAL WORLD
• PART III MASTERS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL PORTRAIT: AN ANNOTATED PORTFOLIO
• A Parting Word
• Index