I’m currently just casually reading about Deleuzian philosophy. Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, and Félix Guattari wrote about truth as coming from multiple sources.
A very quick summary is that you can have a bunch of sources of information, and without saying one is right or wrong, you can pick and choose what works for you. What does any of this have to do with photography? Well, probably heaps. But more specifically, at least for the purpose of this article, we’re going to focus on posing. There are so many resources on how photographers should pose models, but very few of these cover how photographers should pose models from the point of view of the model, although Coco Rocha’s book is a must-have!
Chris and Anna lean into model Carina-Lucia’s knowledge of posing in this video.
It has to flow. And you can move out of one pose and into another one, and the movement in-between can be a beautiful pose as well.
Carina talks about being natural and relaxed. She emphasizes how important it is for photographers to actively communicate with their models; this includes things such as communicating what the shoot is about or how they want the model to emote or things as simple as letting the model know what is actually in the frame. There isn’t much point for a model to do these larger-than-life poses with arms and legs all out if the photographer is only shooting the face in that particular frame!
Another part of active communication is honesty. If something isn’t working, it’s not just a photographer’s vision but should be a joint goal everyone is working towards. Tell your models what isn’t working, and you can both figure out how to change something.
It’s important to remember that a photographer doesn’t make a photoshoot. It really takes collaboration between photographer, model, and teams of makeup artists, hairstylists, fashion stylists, and designers, etc. Because everyone has a part to play, communicating and working together will yield much better results than this idea of a hero lone ranger photographer.