PERFECT STRANGERS & FRIENDS 2019-2024 (also see Perfect Strangers 2025 & Portraits for Charity)
People's faces are intriguing, beguiling, challenging. All have their beauty and mystery. Some are classically beautiful. Others express their beauty through the eyes, whilst another group of people may do so when they smile and a seemingly passive face becomes suffused with an inner light. Sometimes beauty emerges from under the vulnerability of shyness as a face is turned away to avoid eye contact yet a sense of mystery surrounds it like an aura.
When I take portraits, I look for this deeper, some might say more subtle, beauty.
I have found that many people, especially in cities, feel the need to hide their true nature and 'wear' their face as if it is a protective mask. Others, however, can reveal a great deal about themselves in a fleeting glance. So I always carry a card that explains I am a photographer who, amongst other interests, specialises in classic black and white portraits. Consequently, if I see someone, or a pair, or a group in the street, or across the tube carriage, or sitting beside me in a concert or at a play, or across the room at a party and I am drawn to an indefinable something about the way they look, I give them a card. Almost everyone accepts it. Understandably, many are wary at such an approach from a stranger, and never contact me. However, some email me and ask for more details. A number end up having their portrait taken.
My aim over the next few years is to photograph over 500 'PERFECT STRANGERS' and groups or pairs of FRIENDS from as many different countries as possible. Seen together at some future date in a gallery, I hope the portraits will express the fact that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder, but something we keep as a gift inside all of us. We just need to find the look or the word or the circumstance to give it freedom of expression.
If you are looking at this part of my website and are interested in being a 'Perfect Stranger', please email me: morrisonmike33@gmail.com
PHOTOGRAPHY AS ART
I have always admired the Impressionist, Expressionist and Abstract Impressionist painters of the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries. Therefore, in various ways, I have been exploring colour, shape and ‘broad brushstrokes’ in my photographs to try to replicate the visual impact of those paintings.
For example, I am a great admirer of Rothko’s abstracts, of the way in which his juxtaposition of colours give his colours a spiritual depth, and how his brushstrokes and layering creates a texture that deepens their impact enormously.
FLOWER CONVERSATIONS
Photographed in a certain way, in profile one might say, when montaged face to face, it is as if these flowers are conversing, arguing, dancing, comforting, greeting each other.
When photographing cut flowers in a studio, I find that personifying them in this way gives the images humour, and it is as if the energy these flowers have when they are still growing, is sustained.
PERFECT STRANGERS 2025 & PORTRAITS FOR CHARITY
Whenever I do an exhibition, if the space allows, I set up a pop-up studio for a couple of days in order to take portraits, with the donations from the sitters all going to the charity Cecily’s Fund (www.cecilysfund.org.uk).
Using only natural light from a single window source, and taking the shots against a white sheet, these have proved to be very popular. I usually ask for a minimum donation, though people often donate more, and I email the resulting portraits to the sitters as jpeg files.
Aside from raising funds for the charity, which is its main purpose of course, it also allows me to continue (hopefully!) to sharpen my portraiture skills, as well as giving me the opportunity to meet, even if only for a few minutes, lots of wonderful, generous people, some of whom, I am delighted to say, have become friends.
THE PANORAMIC PERSPECTIVE
Presenting photographs in panoramic form alters how we look at them. Maybe it is because elongating, and thus emphasising the horizontal, changes where we instinctively look for the infinity point as our guide to how the whole image has been composed.
My next book will explore this notion further, and will include portraits framed using this perspective, especially those which are extreme close-ups
(See my In Yer Face folder)
IN YER FACE
In Yer Face is a collection of Portraits, the vast majority of which use the panoramic perspective, to create extreme close up images in order to emphasise that the focus is not on the ‘look’ but on the character, the inner life of the sitter at that moment. The extreme close up framing cuts out all ‘distractions’ by encouraging the viewer to look at the eyes and the mouth, the two most expressive facial features.
