Two Photographs: a study.

Cate Blanchett, by Bill Henson for TIME magazine, 2013.

http://au.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/936757/bill-henson-on-his-portrait-of-cate-blanchett-for-time
This image attracted me and I wondered why.  Bill Henson's responses in the article above didn't answer my question, so I studied the image itself.

Composition
A portrait-format rectangle.  The head and the hand are illuminated against a black background.  The line of the truncated neck leads the gaze to the wrist's truncation.  The bend of the hand draws it back towards the face, yet the curled fingers slow the gaze's amovement so that it lingers on the face before travelling around the outline back over the hair to the nape.  The whole forms a kind of inverted teardrop, flying upwards from bottom left towards top right.
Mood
There's a pensive uncertainty to the pose.  The model looks left and down, back towards the past, not right and forwards to the future.  The fingers are raised to the mouth, a common action indicating uncertainty.  Possibly the ancestor of this gesture is finger-or thumb-sucking as a source of comfort.  The eyes are downcast, open but unseeing; the model sees in her mind's eye and does not desire the distraction of seeing something physical.
Pose and Lighting
The photograph is taken with a portrait lens, say 90mm.  There is a single diffused light, high and slightly left.  It illuminates the contours, modelling the nearer half of the face.  The other half is nearly in darkness.  The unlit cheek is just visible and its edge is in line with with the tip of the nose, avoiding over-emphasis of this feature.  A standard three-quarter face then.  The brightest point is the hand; it attracts the gaze and supports the weight of the head.  The index finger could be straight; the top joint can't be seen; it may even be in the mouth.  The other fingers curl progressively; the pinkie almost touches the palm.  There are no catch-lights on the eyes: they would be inappropriate; the model is introspective, not alert.
Model
Cate is beautiful, blonde, smooth-skinned and very slim.  The lighting, mainly on the nearer side of the face, accentuates what flesh covers the skull.  To have lit the distant side of the face instead would have slimmed the nearer side even more.  The hair is a little untidy.  This imperfection is artful: hair as smooth as the complexion would have suggested a statue rather than a human being.   Instead, it indicates humanity and reflects the uncertainty of the subject.  Colour is used here to soften the image.

Harrison Ford, by Michael Birt, May 1999, New York

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=michael+birt+photographer&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=y_ayUqL2Lcep0AW454GoAQ&ved=0CEoQsAQ&biw=1440&bih=788#facrc=_&imgdii=KscLWaG4vYk8rM%3A%3BYUjmROlkVWc6DM%3BKscLWaG4vYk8rM%3A&imgrc=KscLWaG4vYk8rM%3A%3BGOTr_RpWP1fXGM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.ephotozine.com%252Fimages%252Fexhibitions%252Fnorm%252F1032_1169035329.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.ephotozine.com%252Fexhibition%252Fmichael-birt--portraits-1756%3B300%3B300
A complete contrast; there's no uncertainty or introspection here.

Composition
Square format.  Head and shoulder, closely cropped, losing the top of the head and part of the shoulder.  The model presses against the right-hand edge of the frame, prevented from escaping by the raised forearm, leaving a blank area upper left.  The hands are visible, pressed into the face.  They seem strong.  The shadow along the large vertical muscle at the side of the neck (M. sternocleidomastoideus) emphasises its strength.  The model makes a truncated triangle, a strong, stable shape.  There's tension in the hand supporting the chin.  Everything in the pose and composition is about strength.

Pose and Lighting
A wide-angle lens allows the photographer to get close; the model is in the viewer's space.  The model faces full front and stares at the camera.  The nearest hand is foreshortened, but the ear is very much reduced.  There are two lights; a diffused rectangular box provides most of the illumination, modelling the face, cheek and neck and spilling softly onto the plain background to contrast with the model's black T-shirt.  The right-hand eye is shaded from by the bending fingers of the hand.  Another light, small and direct, provides a catch-light in each eye, especially the shaded one.  The direct, close gaze is challenging; this is someone to be reckoned with.  The impact of monochrome makes this a hard image.

The photographer says, "Ford's obvious physical strength, intelligence and intensity were summoned for a private moment in the studio."  To me, the actor looks fed up.
The World's Top Photographers' Portraits, 2004, Fergus Greer, Rotovision SA, Switzerland.

Study

The photographers clearly put a lot of thought into preparing for these portraits.  I spent a long time looking at just two images; I clearly need to spend at least as much time thinking about the posed photographs I take.

Random Readings

Snowdon

"I like to direct my subjects and tell them exactly what to do.  It is not always a matter of making people feel totally at ease.  Often the only way one can break through someone's prepared face is to make them slightly uncomfortable, physically or mentally.  Sometimes people can be awkard or ill at ease in a way that expresses themselves better than when they are relaxed.  I may, perhaps, ask them to hold a pose for longer than is natural, or I make a remark about the sitter or their work that surprises them, and then watch for their immediate reaction.  On the other hand, I sometimes ask someone to move fractionally, not because I know what I want them to do, but simply because I do not like what I'm seeing and if the person moved I might like it more.  Only when things are going badly do I use the tactic of talking; it is a conscious and artificial device and I only listen to what is said in the hopes that an idea will come out of it; sometimes I leave the sitter alone for a few minutes to change the mood."
Snowdon, 1984. Sittings 1979-1983. Paperback. London. Wiedenfeld & Nicholson

How Fictional are Photographs? by Colin Graham

“Exploring the connection between the literary and the photographic can end up turning on two related paradoxes.”

1.    The notion ‘fiction’ tries to split photography between the real and the fictional.
2.    The photograph is an instant, whereas the literary tells a story that takes place in time.  Yet a photograph can imply a story and writing can describe an instant.  We read photographs in the context of the photographs and stories that have gone before.

A photograph is not the subject, but a trace of the subject.  The trace implies the subject, which existed within time and is the result of some passage of time.  Yet we see the image first then infer the subject so the normal chronology is reversed.  “Photographs … are not the thing they purport to be, and come before the thing they purport to come after.”

 

The article contains sentences complicated by a Roland Barthes-ian parentheticality:

"This doubled narrativity is a useful way to think, askew, of the fictionality of the photograph, so that we ask not if it mirrors reality, or if its chance of reflecting a truth is perverted by the power which produces or distributes the image, but instead we recognise this backwards-unravelling story which is in every photograph, as it appears, now, to show us then."

Graham, C., 2013. How Fictional are Photographs? Source, The Photographic Review, Summer 2013, 75, pp.40-41

Lee Miller on Portraiture

"She dislikes having any friend come along with her clients because, she explains, 'They always give a person and "audience complex", or make him or her wear a "gallery smile", and both are unnatural."
"And a good photograph is just that, to catch a person not when he is aware of it but when he is his natural self."
Article first published in the Poughkeepsie Star, 1/11/1932.

Diane Arbus on Photographs

"They are the proof that something was there and no longer is.  Like a stain.  And the stillness of them is boggling.  You can turn away but when you come back they'll still be there, looking at you."
March 1971.  Probably in "Diane Arbus", 1972, New Yourk, Aperture.