Kara Petersen

A tagline I came up with for my[photographer]self (and my Instagram profile) is: “Stealing glances at beautiful people, places, streets, and things.”

This post is going to focus on one of the four – people.

I’ve found that some of the most beautiful photo subjects are people. In each of the photos I’ve incorporated into this photo essay, my subjects are people. A large majority of them are my closest friends, which makes having them in my pictures even more special and gives an even stronger subjective quality to my work.

In relation to documentary filmmaking, the performative mode emphasizes subjective or expressive aspects of the filmmaker’s own involvement with a subject and heightens the audience’s responsiveness to the involvement (Nichols). In this photo essay, I, the “filmmaker,” am emphasizing subjective and expressive aspects of my own involvement with my subjects.

A performative piece of work relies on the author’s own voice. Just as documentaries do, someone’s photography can have its own voice. My photos can tell you a lot about the people in them as well as about myself – what I see in them, the emotions I’m pulling from them, why I capture a certain moment or a certain look, what they might be thinking, what mood they might be in, and so much more. “Voice,” in the performative mode, is characterized by an engaged orator pursuing truth of what it feels like to experience the world in particular ways. In pursuing such truths, I capture people experiencing, and just being in, the world around us.

The best is catching them when they don’t know it… Like the photo I took of my friend Dante just after sitting down for coffee with him. The beautifully genuine expression I caught in his face is one of my favorites. Or the one of Andrew reading at a table outside Thunderbird Coffee as he kept me and my homework company.

There’s something so striking about people…about people in silence with themselves…and there’s nothing I enjoy more than capturing such moments and being able to hold onto them forever.

Placing someone in my photos – at or within a location I want to photograph – makes them ten times better. They, the people, breathe life into the surroundings, and as a result, into my photographs. Anytime I see a wall or a tree or a mural or a structure that I find appealing and photogenic, I immediately think how much better the photo I have in my mind would be if there was someone in it. So, because I’m usually alone when these things and places are spotted, I keep a list of their locations and make a point to go back later with a friend and play photographer once again.

Unless I’m solely observing and snapping a photo spontaneously (which is what quite a few of these photos are a result of), I place my subject there. But I don’t tell them what to do. I don’t tell them how to stand, how to act, what expression to make, etc. And I think that’s what’s most beautiful. I get to watch them be natural in the face of the camera. I so enjoy catching expressions in their faces, my friends especially. Those are the best – the moments, the expressions you catch when someone is deep in thought or simply standing or sitting in silence, looking (or not looking) at you, the photographer. Our faces and our eyes can tell so much about our state of mind, even if only in that singular moment, and that’s what I enjoy most about taking pictures of my friends.