Visile Portrait Photograph: Jussim, Estelle. Slave to Beauty . . . Life and Career of F. Holland Day. Boston: David R. Godine, 1981. Bibl. ROBERT DEMACHY
Jay, Bill. Robert Demachy 1859-1936: Photographs and Essays. London: Academy Editions, 1974. Bibl. BARON ADOLF DE MEYER
De Meyer. Edited by Robert Brandau. Biographical essay by Philippe Jullian. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. DISDERI, ANDRE
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. A. A. E. Disderi and the Carte de Visile Portrait Photograph. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
The plan works this way. You go to some supermarket owner or manager, timing your visit to hit when he or she is looking for something new that will capture the imagination of customers who have become jaded with the promotions that have been used.
You lay it on the line in these words: "With portrait dollars, your customers will receive a prized portrait made by a professional photographer living in your community. This photograph will become more valuable with the passing years and will be a source of recurring good will for you as visitors for the harvest. Surveys disclose that a small percentage of people in this age group are photographed in any one year.
Here, again, the photographer will need a strong "motivator" to get these people before the camera. Very few will come in on their own.
Lange could make a deserted farmhouse, abandoned in acres of machine-plowed land, an eloquent definition of the phrase "tractored-out," which was on the lips of hundreds of dispossessed farmers. Her photograph of a migrant mother surrounded by her children, huddled in a tent, became the most widely reproduced of all the FSA pictures. She wrote:
My own approach is based upon three considerations. First-hands off! Whatever I photograph, I do not molest or tamper with or arrange. Second-a sense of place. Whatever I photograph, I try to picture as part of its surroundings, as having roots. Third-a sense of time. Whatever I photograph, I try to show as having its position in the past or in the present.
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Photography
