PEOPLELESS PORTRAITS

There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

 

The theme for this week’s post is Peopleless Portraits. So what do I mean by that?  It’s the things we choose to surround ourselves with that tell the story of who we are and what we’re all about and photographing a person’s possessions is a photographic metaphor of that person or an aspect of their personality.

Here are a few Peopleless Portraits for your perusing pleasure today.

Portrait of a Faery Door Maker |Canon 60D, 50mm lens | f/2, ISO400, 1/60s | Edited in LR

There are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go ‘trapsin about the earth’ at their own free will; ‘but there are faeries,’ she added, ‘and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels.’ I have met also a man with a mohawk Indian tattooed upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter what one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the mohawk Indian on his arm said to me, ‘they stand to reason.’ Even the official mind does not escape this faith. (“Reason and Unreason”)”
― W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

 

Portrait of a Photographer |Canon 60D, 24mm lens | f/2.8, ISO400, 1/30s | Edited in LR

To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”
― Ansel Adams, American photographer

Whenever possible, always be yourself,