portret

Very interesting lighting.  You've captured her eye perfectly and the rest is harmonious.  Very good job!

Intense image, very well composed and jumps right out of the frame, superb work.

Hi Tess, this is a beautiful image, well composed and really amazing. Good job! Best regards. MAx

Well, perhaps my comment couldn't be so useful as a contribution to the discussion here, but I must say that the aesthetics is remarkable, the same for the concept and execution, with an emotional impact due to the gaze depth and questions provoked. Who is she? for example.
Excellent work.

As an abstract, I find the image to be quite engaging. As its title indicates, if Tess intended it as portraiture per se, I would be inclined to wonder why only half of the subject's face is visible and why only her eye has any detail.

IMO, there is no proper formula for a portrait. They come in all shapes and sizes with varying degrees of detail and varying amounts of information about the person pictured. Some portraits are meant as portraits of human-ness rather than as a portrait of the person herself, or some combination of those two. To answer your question specifically, my guess would be that the photographer wanted to be suggestive and wanted a portrait with mystique and didn't want to be direct. She seems to be trying to create a mood as much as anything else. And portraits are allowed to do that. This is not meant to be a likeness of someone.

That being said, while the photo for me has a kind of Pictorial elegance (sense of diagonal, serene composition, soft lines and textures, indications of beauty), the highlights, especially the lower one on her mouth, are too chalky and begin to look more like makeup than light. For me, there's a striking quality to it at first glance but it doesn't take me further than a first glance. It has a lot of the surface markings of mood and atmosphere but it doesn't get me emotionally involved. Eye shots like this have simply become a little too cliché for me though if I sense emotional depth or meaningful expression in the eye, I will still be drawn in. This eye doesn't do it. It just feels like it's looking directly at me, with no questioning, no longing, no beckoning, no particular personality.

Fred, I looked at Tess' portfolio. Finding no other portraits, I must confess that I have no basis by which to compare the POTW's style. Nor do I have any real clue as to Tess' intent for it.

Michael, seriously, couldn't you come up with some answers without looking at the rest of Tess's portfolio? I'm not asking you to be clairvoyant, just to use your imagination as to why the portrait may have been done like this. You may absolutely reach the decision that you don't like it or it doesn't work for you for any number of reasons. That's not what I'm questioning. Why would not specifically knowing the photographer's intentions keep you from being able to look at this and fill in some blanks with regard to why it was done this way? Did any of the suggestions I made for why it may have been done this way make sense to you? You won't always have—as a matter of fact it will probably be rare—the photographer around to explain his or her photos to you. Some sense of unprovable empathy has to be at play between viewer and photographer. Put yourself in Tess's shoes (the unknown Tess as only known through this photo) and imagine why the portrait was done this way. I think if you challenge yourself to do that, you might not necessarily come up with what I came up with, but you might be able to understand more about it on your own, even if you still don't like it.

Sorry. This could be a distraction. You actually said you do like it (find it engaging) but don't understand it as a portrait. That's really what I want to discuss with you . . . ways you might come up with to view it as a portrait.

I want to like this image/portrait. I have held off commenting so I could come back to it in different moods and attitudes. There is something that keeps me from investing emotionally. Perhaps it is, for me, that the woman's face seems so completely emotionless. No smile, no frown, so much of the face obscured that we do not see any of the other facial clues. The singular orb of the eye suspended in space, no details in the skin, almost disconnected from the rest of the face. I agree with Fred that the light on her mouth is obtrusive. I don't know what, if any, message is intended, but I am most reminded of the closing shot in Avatar, which is not necessarily a high compliment. And yet, I want to like it...

Now that I have expressed my feelings in words, I think I might understand why I have them. One of the defining characteristics of CGI faces is a failure to accurately express detailed facial expressions. CGI and hand drawn animation routinely express gross facial emotions, particularly as exaggerations. What they don't communicate are the very fine, detailed, and expressive movements that constitute over 90% of human communication. Perhaps my allusion to the final shot of Avatar is more apropos than I thought: This face, even with its wonderfully detailed eye, feels devoid of emotion, with my response being likewise emotionless. Hmmmm...

Very nice - a touch of Bunuel/Dali in everyday life. Wish I had taken it.

Hello David,
After carefully reading your comment, I took a second look at the image, and to me it is not devoid of emotions. I think one familiar reason why CGI faces lack emotion connection is that their emotional features (often exaggerated as you pointed out) are not synchronous. In a real human face, the individual emotional features are usually parts of a single emotional state of the person. In a CGI face, they are subtly not.

In this image, I feel a connection when she gives me that stare, and I don't think its a blank stare. To me, the stare is a challenge, an invitation to know her and find out what lies hidden. The lips (not too tight but slightly stiff) are also in harmony with the eye's expression.

Supriyo, like I said, I remain somewhat conflicted. You may well have a point. I'm anxious to read what others see and feel. Perhaps my own perception will be better informed. As always, it's not about what it means so much as about how it makes us feel.

Very reminiscent of the "Clockwork Orange" "pub" when that Kubrick film came out. The eye and mouth are somewhat consistent emotionally, which can be perceived as a sort of an intense disdain or discomfort or questioning with regard to the object (photographer) of the subject. The downward angle puts a sort of odd and not often seen shallow "U" of eye white, while the placement of the pupille just touching the eyebrow adds to the intense stare. The overblown highlights are perhaps desired for effect in this contrasty image. Not sure the portrait works perfectly, but I feel it nevertheless deserves an A for both compositional and communicative uniqueness of approach.

Some interesting comments.

I'm being moved to see this a little differently when I put together Michael's original comments with David's and add Robin's insight as well. This combination of abstractness, surrealism, and avatar/science fiction in terms of portraiture makes for some interesting possibilities. There's nothing (IMO) inherently wrong with "objectifying" the subject of a portrait (a kind of imaginative de-humanization) as long as it's not exploitive, mean, or dismissive. If done with intention and a degree of thought, I think all of this could be an interesting approach. In that sense, Michael was onto something in looking at Tess's portfolio in the hopes of gleaning something about her approach. If this were part of a body of work or series that was moving in that surreal/sci-fi direction, it might have a lot more grab for me. And taking a second and third look, after having read various comments (including Arthur's most recent), I'm inclined to give it a little more credit. As a stand-alone photo, it still doesn't quite make it for me, but I'm happy to have the benefit of others' feedback in moving toward a different way of looking at this. My original take was that it was a failed kind of Pictorial image hoping to attain a take on beauty. And I still have a feeling that's what was being attempted here. In that respect, I think the photographer was going for just the type of response given by Sweid, a very sensitive photographer and viewer himself. But if I look for a depth of gaze, etc. I simply don't find it. I think there's more potential in actually seeing her as somehow hardened in the photographer's eye, a portrait which doesn't have to invite us in and in some respects sends us packing, the world of the avatars pushing us emotional beings away. Anyway, I think it would be a road worth developing and would then have the potential of becoming anything but cliché.

I don't really see this as a portrait in any conventional sense - showing us the person, trying to indicate their personality and so on. I see this more simply as a striking image with great aesthetic appeal and to be enjoyed for that. Who she is is not all that important to me - but if it is, the shot tells us little: thereby contributing to the enigmatic quality of the image.

Fred, perhaps I approached the POTW with a preconceived notion of a portrait. Yet, having read your responses to my comments and especially your most recent post, I think I simply stated my initial post poorly. Please understand that I wasn't trying to get inside Tess's head to glean her intent for the image; I wanted to see if there were any additional portrait shots in her portfolio so I could get a better idea of her style.

I could have stuck with how and/or why I connected with the abstract elements of the image. In retrospect, I think I was struck by the combination of the wide open eye, the white streaks, the highly closed lips, and the darkening of the left side of her face. They gave - and still give - me the impression of a warrior trying to ascertain whether I am friend or foe. I'm not sure whether I should allow myself to be taken in by her mysterious appearance or whether I should run for my life.

Please substitute "tightly" for "highly" in my last post.

Talk about my portrait from the "abstraction" with "one eye" liberated desire to show more my work ..
Thank you for your interest in my work and diverse look ....
Regards, Tess

"diverse look"

Yes, that is a good enough way to describe it. It is beautiful.

--Lannie