As a springboard from all the portrait work I’ve done over the past three years, I, at some time during that process, became really attuned/enamored/moved by people’s faces and started experimenting with a new creative study. Internally we’re calling it “60”. In short, it’s really simple: I’m taking 60 second video portraits of people. No instruction, no direction, no coaching, nothing. Just the camera pointed at them for a minute.
Although the concept is simple, I’ve found the results to be pretty interesting. At a fundamental level, the human face says a lot, even without the person saying anything at all.
While I’ve been at this for a while, I thought it would be time to start sharing some of these portraits here on the blog. This chase jarvis 60 features world-renowned explorer Mike Horn. You may remember Mike from my Pangaea experience across the South China Sea with Panerai watches. [Lots of posts here, here, and here.] It was a life changing experience for me, and a good bit of it was getting to know Mike. Hopefully you’ll get to know him a little here as well.
Love to know your thoughts.
[aside: if you are interested in seeing these videos when I post them to youtube, rather than just the occasional ones that make it here to the blog, you’re invited to subscribe to my youtube channel here. thx]
Shout out to McKenzie Stubbert for the music.
I think you’ve sparked my creative juices Chase, thank you! 🙂
Who cares whether or not there’s anything new here. Comment on the project/work on its own merits or not at all.
I just came across these clips which I thought were really well done. Not portraits but they’re along similar lines…
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/12/magazine/14actors.html?hp#index
This was the link I meant to add: http://www.dalzielscullion.com/works_page/film/another_video.html
Nothing new here I’m afraid. One of the skills of a photographer is to frame a section of the ‘chaos’ that is the world around us and make an image that interests and attracts our imagination and attention. Moving pictures, for me, should have a concept, a story, something that one single image can’t portray. These slo-mo shots of a person’s face with emotive music (another discussion point here – moody music=moody guy??) are quite common and as others have said, boring. They don’t work for me because they don’t do what a powerful single image does (the WOW factor) nor do they have a story line nor interesting moving images.
Andy Warhol went one step further and challenged our thinking of moving images when he recorded hours upon hours of the Empire State building. Nothing moved or changed except the fact it got dark and they switched the lights on! Boring but a statement I suppose. As Andy said ‘Art is what you can get away with’.
Here’s a variation on the 60s theme: http://www.dalzielscullion.com/works_page/film/one_minute_video.html
Seems as if I wanted him to speak, and that He kind-of wanted to speak. I’m not sure which one of us was paralyzed just then.