Face to face: the subtle art of portraiture

The pop­u­lar pho­tog­ra­pher Ger­va­sio Sánchez spends be­tween one and 60 sec­onds to take a por­trait. If he takes more time than that, he knows the re­sult will be de­cep­tive. He says he doesn't like to “make peo­ple dizzy”, be­cause what he most val­ues is nat­u­ral­ness. Sánchez, who has ex­pe­ri­enced war first­hand says: “For me por­traits are a tool to show the drama of peo­ple who live in war or post-war sit­u­a­tions with dig­nity.” He re­mem­bers all of the names of those he has pho­tographed, such as Sofia, a lit­tle girl from Mozam­bique who had both legs blown off by bomb. He talks of her as if she was his daugh­ter.

Yet, the fact is that every pho­tog­ra­pher has a dif­fer­ent way of tak­ing a por­trait. One of the mae­stros of the genre, Hum­berto Rivas, used to say that for him it was like a fight be­tween the pho­tog­ra­pher and the model: “If the pho­tog­ra­pher doesn't win, the image doesn't work.”

For an­other top por­trait pho­tog­ra­pher, Al­berto García-Alix, a good pho­to­graph hap­pens in an al­most cathar­tic state. Born a provo­ca­teur, García-Alix dis­man­tles one of the most pop­u­lar say­ings: “The face is not the mir­ror of the soul. The pho­tog­ra­pher must know the in­ten­tion be­hind a pho­to­graph, what and how he wants to see it.”

The Fun­dació Foto Colecta­nia has opened its new sea­son with an ex­hi­bi­tion of por­traits care­fully se­lected from its archive, made up of more than 3,000 pho­tographs signed by Span­ish and Por­tuguese artists. The show, ti­tled Cara a cara, is in Barcelona after a long jour­ney through mu­nic­i­pal ex­hi­bi­tion halls, as part of a pro­ject spon­sored by the Diputació. How­ever, the Barcelona show is dif­fer­ent, and is spon­sored by Es­trella Damn.

The more than 100 works on dis­play, which go from the 1950s to the pre­sent, are signed by 49 dif­fer­ent pho­tog­ra­phers and are grouped into two sec­tions: one that fo­cuses on looks and an­other on ges­tures.

Oriol Maspons, Al­berto Schom­mer, Miguel Trillo, Joan Colom, Ri­card Terré, Leopoldo Pomés and Toni Catany are some of the artists fea­tured in this por­trait ex­trav­a­ganza. All of them ex­hibit their own artis­tic per­son­al­ity, but share a men­tal frame­work, which Juan Manuel Cas­tro Pri­eto de­fines as, “what mat­ters is the human being.”