National Geographic News
This fall National Geographic Books is releasing In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits , an assembly of portraits from the National Geographic Society's collection of 10.5 million photographs. (See photos from the book.)
National Geographic News recently spoke with the book's senior and associate editors, Leah Bendavid-Val and Chris Johns. (Johns will take over the editorial reins of National Geographic magazine in January.) The pair spoke about the significance of portraits and offered advice for aspiring photographers.
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What makes a good portrait?
Leah Bendavid-Val: The question—what makes a good photographic portrait?—is very difficult to answer and in fact may be unanswerable. Everybody who worked on In Focus asked an even more basic question, What is a portrait?
National Geographic photographers have taken thousands of pictures of people. So many of them are truly wonderful, but are they all portraits? Our book takes up this question in several ways, and we hope the reader will find the book not only entertaining but also thought provoking.
Chris Johns: The great portraits are about a connection between the photographer and the subject. The connection that the photographer and the subject make with one another is reflected then to the person who looks at the photograph. Now, how do you know when that connection works the best? It's when the photograph goes straight from your eyes to your heart.
As an editor, what do you look for in a portrait?
Bendavid-Val: The first thing I look for is whether or not the picture is affecting. If it doesn't touch the viewer on an emotional level, if the viewer doesn't somehow connect with the subject in the picture, nothing else matters.
Many photographs are technically accomplished, but if there's no authentic emotional content, which can be extremely elusive and difficult to attain, the picture simply won't be memorable. Occasionally a technically weak photograph has such great emotional power that the technical content becomes almost unimportant.
Johns: I look for a photograph that has that strong connection, that has a degree of storytelling, insight, but also has the strong emotional appeal. It's a picture that transcends time and place … and will stand the test of time.
That picture will resonate with people. It will grab people, make them care, help them understand. And, if it's doing all those things well, then it will probably stand the test of time [and] will be an important statement about humanity for generations to come.
