A portrait is

Here I’m going to talk about how I currently see a genre of portrait painting and how we, two people on both sides of the camera, are working on it. 

I’m asking you to read this short text before you decide to contact me.

A portrait is

When I hear a review about a photo such as “Wow! It’s like a movie” than I think this is how the highest praise about a photo should sound. Cinema is all about Time. It’s about the development of some kind of a story and its characters. So when a viewer looks at the picture he intuitively feels that there is something in the photo that is not shown. There are a lot of things that could be in a picture: a history of the place; a story of the character, his past history and the future captured at the time of taking the picture and shown to a random person from the future.

So a viewer says “It’s like in a movie!” 

I'm talking about portraits. When I take portraits I ask people to remember that they, each of them, is the History. I do not ask them to tell anything, I only ask to silently take a look at themselves in the past and the future at a present moment. And at this very moment, I try to capture your Story and yourself.

A portrait is all about trust. At the time of shooting it’s all about trust to each other on both sides of the camera. And after that, it’s all about trust to a viewer. 

Portraits are always sincere. You can see it in the photo. That what makes it so special.

A portrait is an internal monologue of the person being portrayed. 

A portrait is a continuous conversation without words between a hero of the portrait, a viewer and an author of the photo. 

A portrait is always a collaboration. If each of us completely dedicates himself to a shooting process than most likely we will see everything described above.

P.S. I wish more interesting work and real honest portraits to all of us.

Respectrfully,
Vyacheslav Kovalevich, photographer.
june 2019