Part I – The History of Careful Staging
A dear friend recently told me that she could not make much of my photographs of people. It was the poses that bothered her: too staged, not natural enough. In the early days of photography, she suggested, things had been different. People had not posed like that. Everything had been entirely natural.
She is perfectly entitled not to like my pictures. Friendship obliges us to do many things, but fortunately it does not require unanimous approval of every artistic decision the other person makes. Her historical reasoning, however, struck me as odd. Surely the exposure times of early photography alone meant that a person had to assume a position and hold it for a while, preferably without wobbling. It had to be a position one could maintain for longer than the fleeting gesture with which we might accompany a conversation today. Early portrait photography therefore seemed to me a rather unlikely candidate for the lost paradise of the unselfconscious snapshot.
That left a question hanging in the air, and it refused to leave me alone. The fact that people had to keep still did not, after all, explain how they sat, where they looked or what their hands were given to do in the meantime. Where did technical necessity end and artistic direction begin? And when did we start treating the visible pose with suspicion while readily granting truthfulness to an image that merely appears to have happened in passing?
Why Posing Concerns Me
In my own work, the position of a body is not a minor detail. References to Art Deco and expressive dance are part of the visual language of Artis Umbrae: tension, geometry, the relationship between body and shadow, a gesture that asserts itself in space. An arm can form a diagonal, a hand can carry a thought forward, and a turn of the torso can transform an entire composition. These images do not pretend that the woman being photographed simply happened to be standing around the studio like that. They arise from deliberate collaboration in front of and behind the camera.
In my commissioned work, particularly in boudoir photography, the emphasis shifts. There I am interested in elegance, curves, triangles and the transitions between skin, fabric and light. Sensuality does not have to elbow its way into the viewer’s attention. A hand that has found its proper place can be more convincing than an entire collection of ostentatiously seductive gestures. For me, classical nude photography and low-key bodyscapes likewise depend on posture and pictorial intent working together.
“Be sexy” is therefore a rather meagre posing instruction. One might as well hand someone a violin and demand, “Make it sound moving.” The objective would have been roughly identified. How to achieve it would, very considerately, remain their problem.
I have accordingly studied posing in considerable depth. For that very reason, I did not want to mistake my own experience for the last available word on the subject. I wanted to sharpen my eye, refine my directions and understand where the ideas I work with had come from. My daughter Selina, who works at a university, helped with the research and obtained a dissertation for me by Jennifer Elizabeth Anne Rudd: Posing, Candor, and the Realisms of Photographic Portraiture, 1839–1945, submitted in 2014 to Columbia University in the field of communications.
Behind that title lies a study of photographic and media history centred on a question that is decidedly uncomfortable for photographers: what, at a particular point in history, do we consider a credible image of a person—and why?
Please Don’t Move. This Is Natural Now.
To begin with, my reading confirmed my technical objection. Early photographic processes placed considerable restrictions on the kinds of poses that could be recorded at all. Even here, however, we need to correct the popular notion that throughout the entire nineteenth century everyone invariably sat motionless for minutes in front of every camera. Processes improved rapidly. Exposure times varied considerably depending on the date, equipment and lighting conditions. Long minutes could become significantly shorter intervals. Even so, the need to remain sufficiently still for the exposure remained an essential condition of early portrait practice.
Poses were adapted to meet that condition. Chairs, armrests and headrests helped to limit movement. The person in front of the camera had to cooperate with a technical process that showed little consideration for any spontaneous inclination they might have had. Naturalness occasionally came with a support at the back of the neck.
Technology, however, does not explain everything. For many people, having a portrait made was a special and rare event. The purpose was not to preserve some arbitrary second, but to create an image that did them justice and that they wished to leave to others. Clothing, posture and facial expression all served that intention. The solemnity of many early portraits cannot therefore be attributed solely to long exposure times. It also reflected the significance of the occasion and contemporary expectations of what constituted a fitting representation of oneself.
Someone who deliberately sat upright and looked calmly into the camera did not necessarily appear dishonest to their contemporaries. Such a depiction could be regarded as dignified, sincere and characteristic. Visible preparation was not automatically evidence against the truth of the image.
This already represents a considerable shift from our modern suspicion: perhaps people were no less posed. Perhaps they were simply less troubled by the fact that one could see it.
The Camera Was New. Ideas About Images Were Not.
Photography did not emerge into a world in which no one had yet considered how a person ought to be represented. Portrait painting had long since developed its own conventions. Those who took up the camera did not need to reinvent either posture or composition. The pose was already there and had been working for someone else.
The exchange went in both directions. Photographers drew upon painterly modes of representation. Conversely, painters were quick to use photographs as studies for their paintings. A photograph could record a face, a pose and clothing while the final composition took shape on canvas. It did not have to be copied without alteration.
A vivid example is the collaboration between the painter David Octavius Hill and the photographer Robert Adamson, which began in 1843. Hill was planning a large painting of the founding of the Scottish Free Church. The individual and group photographic portraits were initially intended as studies. Hill determined the poses and arrangement of the sitters with the later painting in mind; Adamson handled the photographic technique. Some of the photographs served directly as models for the painted figures. At the same time, the collaboration produced photographic works that stood on their own. On the collaboration between Hill and Adamson.
Some early photographs, then, were already records of a staging created for a further staging. For a supposedly wholly natural beginning, that represents a remarkable amount of organisation.
This does not mean that every early photograph was a re-enacted painting. It does, however, show how closely the new technology was connected to established ideas about images. The camera had to be invented. The human desire to create a particular impression in a picture did not need to be supplied separately.
For me, this is an illuminating connection. When I refer to Art Deco or expressive dance today, I too am working with existing forms of expression. What matters is what they become in my own image. A model or precedent makes a composition neither automatically successful nor inherently untruthful. Above all, it does not do the work for you.
People Did Not Merely Have Their Likeness Taken
With the advent of small portraits mounted on card, the so-called cartes de visite, self-presentation acquired a broader social reach. Images were given away, collected and viewed in albums. One’s appearance left the innermost private circle and became something that could circulate.
Rudd describes how people used existing pictures as models. They adopted poses, clothing and modes of representation that appealed to them or suited whatever they wished to embody. The studio provided an appropriate setting. Furniture, backdrops and props helped to create an appearance that society could read.
A pose was therefore more than a particular position of the body. It could express aspiration, belonging, dignity, education or the hope of being perceived accordingly by others. The person before the camera brought not only their body, but also an idea of who they wanted to be in the picture.
We need not immediately treat this as deception. After all, we do not consist solely of those moments in which we are caught unprepared. The effort to compose ourselves and present ourselves deliberately is part of us too. Why should the second in which someone absent-mindedly tugs at their cuff necessarily reveal more about them than a pose they have chosen?
Naturalness by Instruction Manual
Rudd’s study becomes particularly revealing when she places historical manuals side by side. Edward John Wall’s photographic handbook of 1889 warns against simply allowing sitters to adopt whatever position they themselves consider natural. Such positions, it argues, are often unsuitable for a good picture. The photographer was therefore expected to intervene and direct.
In the eighth edition of 1902, now co-authored with Thomas Bolas, naturalness is explicitly placed centre stage. Sitters should be occupied with familiar objects. A woman might be given some needlework, which she would then let sink into her lap before looking up. A man might be handed a walking stick or a pipe, or asked to pick up his hat and gloves.
Naturalness had acquired stage directions.
This is more than an appealing historical curiosity. The instructions reveal a shift in the desired appearance. The photographer did not disappear from the act of shaping the image. They were merely expected to exert their influence in such a way that the result looked less like a photographic sitting. A small action was arranged from which a credible pose could emerge. The pose had not simply been abolished. Its construction had become less conspicuous.
Nor, apparently, is the problem of hands a special achievement of my own studio practice. Rudd cites an article from 1898 recommending that they be given something to do. As early as 1892, the photographer Catharine Weed Barnes had written about an artist friend whose shoulders remained stiff in front of the camera. Only when she put a palette and brushes into his hands did his posture relax.
This feels remarkably familiar. Anyone who thinks only about how their fingers look can easily turn them into five small administrative problems. A comprehensible action can accomplish more than an instruction to please, at long last, look relaxed.
When the Unobserved Moment Became Credible
As cameras became more portable and amateur photography spread, the possibilities expanded. Photographs were increasingly taken outside the studio, amid everyday life. The fleeting moment acquired a new significance. An image could now look as though life had simply happened and the camera had been there by chance.
Yet these images, too, were shaped by expectations. Using Kodak as an example, Rudd shows how ideas of happy family life, leisure and picturesque moments influenced private photography. One could leave the rigid studio pose behind and still follow a fairly precise idea of what was worth photographing. The body moved more freely. The selection of reality considered worth showing remained framed.
In the second major section of her dissertation, Rudd examines different forms of unposed photography in the work of Erich Salomon, Humphrey Spender and Walker Evans. Salomon showed political figures outside their ceremonial self-presentation. Spender turned his camera towards the everyday lives of ordinary people. Evans photographed passengers on the New York subway without giving them a chance to arrange themselves for his pictures.
These works pursued different aims. What they share, however, is the particular importance they attach to a moment not prepared for the camera. It promised access to something that a deliberate portrait might conceal.
The promise is understandable. It is simply not a guarantee. An unnoticed photograph still has a frame, a moment and someone who selects it. The fact that the person photographed is not staging themselves does not mean that the finished image is free of artistic intention. The direction may lie entirely behind the camera.
What Remains in the Studio
Rudd’s study does not, therefore, tell a simple story of progress from the stiff, false pose to the free, truthful human being. It reveals changing ideas of what photographic credibility looks like. A direct gaze can be regarded as sincere or as evidence of overly deliberate self-presentation. An averted gaze can suggest inwardness or be just as much a part of a carefully constructed scene. A gesture alone does not come with a certificate of authenticity.
For my own work, this does not mean that every pose is successful. There are strained positions, empty gestures and pictures in which the instruction is more visible than the person. Historical knowledge does not make them good photographs. It does, however, help me distinguish more precisely why a representation fails. Is deliberate composition really the problem? Or do the pose, the person, the light and the pictorial idea simply fail to work together?
At Artis Umbrae, a gesture may be explicitly composed. It may approach dance, build tension or give physical form to a thought. In a boudoir commission, I look for a different balance: elegance, a fitting posture and an atmosphere in which the woman being photographed is not constantly occupied with monitoring herself. Triangles and curves are tools of composition, not rules prescribing how a person ought to be.
A charming example is the so-called turtle. You may know the instruction, esteemed reader: lengthen the neck and move the head slightly forward towards the camera without raising the chin towards the ceiling. Like a turtle peering out of its shell. This can separate the line of the jaw more clearly from the neck and look entirely natural in the finished portrait. Seen from the side, the whole affair can appear considerably less so. One would neither arrive at a reception that way nor order bread at the bakery. In front of the camera, it can work. So much for the reliable correspondence between a natural pose and a natural-looking image.
In fact, “turtle.at” would make a splendid domain for a portrait studio. The appropriate email address: “stick-your-neck-out@turtle.at”. Feel free to use it; I will not insist on being credited. I have not, however, checked whether the domain is still available. At least the photographic injunction to be natural would then have an honest sender.
The turtle is, of course, no more a universal remedy than any other posing instruction. But it illustrates the point rather nicely: what feels unfamiliar in front of the camera can look entirely right in the photograph. And something that feels perfectly relaxed does not necessarily produce a convincing portrait. The photographer’s work lies somewhere between the two. Occasionally, it begins with a brief excursion into reptile studies.
No one who steps in front of my camera needs to arrive with a complete repertoire of poses. Providing direction is part of my work as a photographer. So is paying attention to when a pose fails and when I need to change my own idea. That is one reason I continue to study this subject—not to collect still more poses, but to recognise more precisely which one an image needs.
My friend may therefore continue to reject my photographs. Her preference for images in which the direction is less visible requires no historical justification. Only the notion of an early photography without poses fails to withstand scrutiny.
People did not stand before the camera beyond the reach of all pictorial conventions even then. They brought expectations with them, followed instructions and sought a convincing representation of themselves. What changed, among other things, was how visible that labour was allowed to be.
Perhaps that is the most useful question I take from this reading: not whether a person is posing in a photograph, but what their pose contributes to the image.
Naturalness, after all, can also be staged. One should simply try not to look so strained while doing it.