Project by: Nika Marohnic (11th Grade), Anna Faulkner (11th Grade)
Project Advisor: Susan Now
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): Shafeiq Baksh (Nika’s advisor), Peter Heinz (Anna’s advisor)

We started off with a broad idea: we both just wanted to explore what it means to take a portrait.

Our initial idea was to take portraits of people during the school day to capture their school life, and then take a portrait of them in their outside of school activities. As we read more about the different artist whose main focus is portrait taking, such as Annie Leibovitz, Steve McCurry, Dorothea Lange, and Angus McBean, we realized there is no one definition of a “good portrait.” Each of these artists had their own different definitions.

We both felt that for us taking a portrait is more intimate than taking a picture of a building, a sandwich, or a bike. You are close to a human subject and you are trying to capture who they are in a single picture, not just their looks, but their likes and dislikes, their personality. Throughout the project, we had differing opinions and ideas, but we would each throw our ideas out, and in the end, we would come to the same conclusion. We never experienced big moments of differing opinions, be it our definition of a portrait or our goal for this project. We also felt like the best portraits we came across in our research (portraits by the artist we mentioned previously) offered solace, insight, made us feel as if we were right there with the subject.

At first, we wanted to take portraits of individuals in their outside of school lives. We thought about what these individuals do outside that their peers might not know about? What could we do to make the portrait speak uniquely about the subject? As we progressed in the project, we kept coming back to the idea that the portrait is a very individualistic experience and we wanted to experiment with that. We asked ourselves,

What if we took two individuals, and blended them together, essentially creating a whole new person?

It would still be a portrait, but a portrait of something new, a subject we didn’t know personally. We spent a long time blending pictures together and discussing when we look at the photo what are we getting from it. Was it creepy? Was it happy? As we got deeper into the project, we discovered that we were able to create something that was connected to the more “traditional” portraits we researched at the start of the project, but that also went beyond them to reflect our own interpretation of a portrait. For our final presentation, we went through our many photos and choose the ones we connected with the most.

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PROJECT PROPOSAL:

Please write a description of the project you are proposing. Why do you want to take this on, and what do you hope to learn?

Throughout this project, we want to explore what makes a good and an interesting portrait. We want to experiment with everything from quirky photos with different color backgrounds, outfits, make-up to something serious with a sadder feel.

What is your proposed outcome? How will you be able to demonstrate successful completion of this Project?

We want to hang our pictures in the staircase or hallways so that people can look at them, it would be a fun way to share photos.

When do you plan on meeting?
Monday during x-block