A “natural” portrait can take a surprising amount of preparation. Clothes chosen, hair checked, perhaps a few trial smiles in the mirror. Then a photograph that suggests none of this required the slightest thought.
Fair enough. You want to look like yourself on a good day. Though I do wonder what happens if you’re naturally a bit serious. Do you have to spend the whole session pretending someone has just told you a wonderful joke?
Joanna Piotrowska’s BURROWED, opening at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence on 10 November, has me thinking about how we read people in photographs. Its new photographs and collages explore intimacy, control, vulnerability and protection. The exhibition leaves room for uncertainty, with viewers piecing together meaning from fragments.
Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled (2026), silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist and Consonni Radziszewski - Lisbon, Milan, Warsaw. Source: Palazzo Strozzi.
My own feeling about portraits is that there’s a relationship going on, even if it only lasts a few minutes. You can feel fully seen and still comfortable. There’s time to talk, try something, change your mind. You don’t have to arrive knowing precisely which version of yourself you’re hoping to meet in the pictures.
Some of my favourite portraits by other photographers show people who are very much themselves and still on guard. I like being left a little curious about them.
Perhaps they’re thoughtful. Perhaps they’re still deciding whether they like the photographer. I think we should allow for that possibility too.
