Faces

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a face can tell a thousand emotions.

If you joined these together, you would have one hell of an image. And yet we come across these images in our life, and we don’t think too much about them. They seem ordinary, not too interesting. But to me, its amazing, every time I see a photograph of a persons face, I have to take a second look, to appreciate the photo, to take it all in. A simple digital camera will do this job so easily, so simply, and it’s the most amazing thing on earth.

I love taking photos. It’s what I do. I first became interested in it back when I was just fifteen years of age. When a new teacher came to the school who was a media studies teacher, I quickly fell in love with the subject. Unfortunately we only had two classes a week with him, but I embraced these classes. I threw myself into the homework we were given, which was take one photo. Just one. I took a photo of my Mom, smiling. The next class he asked me why I took a photo of her, while everyone else had taken a photo of a sunset, or a family pet. I said “This tells more of a story than a sunset or pet, this is a photo of a life.”

So after that I couldn’t stop taking pictures of people, people smiling, people laughing, studying, and writing. The look of determination on some peoples face while they write is incredible, so focused on what they’re doing they don’t even notice my camera.

I began thinking, faces aren’t just on people, there’s the face of the earth, face of the moon, face of the sun and even faces of animals. So I was still taking photo’s of faces, just not human ones. I went in search of the perfect face. I’ve always been interested in nature and landscape. Ireland is so beautiful and to not appreciate what’s on my doorstep would be terrible! The Emerald Isle was calling. So I hiked around Ireland, seeing new mountains, new scenery and new people. Everyone I met I had to take a photo of them.

These faces weren’t as incredible as human faces. Human faces have an unbelievable amount of expression in them. Its nearly impossible to describe a face. Sure, it has a nose, a mouth, two eyes, a chin etc. but really describe it. Each emotion which passes through our faces each and every day is amazing. Sometimes we don’t even know we have an expression on our face until someone says something!

But faces aren’t always filled with joy and laughter. There are dark emotions that can spread across people’s faces. Faces can hide things, hide secrets. They can be used as a mask to hide from people, to hide who you really are. To deceive people and to create a new image. These are hard to capture with a camera.

I have people come into my studio and ask for a family portrait. I see parents bickering and fighting like animals with their kids trying to force them to wear formal clothes. A young boy of seven or eight should not be wearing a suit. Its not who he is and this is what I mean by being deceiving. The little girl, typically would wear a frilly dress and kneel with her hands by her sides. Her face, after all the screaming, a bit red, but nothing a bit of concealer won’t cover up.

This is not real, this is not what I had in mind, but this is what people want. So that is what I must do. Sometimes it drives me crazy, so that’s when I hike and get back to photographing what’s real and what wont change, no matter how much concealer is put on it. Mountains wont change, the weather might make it look different and I guess that’s like nature’s make-up, but behind it the mountain is still the same beautiful piece of land that it always was.

Have you ever walked into town and looked at the people who you walk past? I mean really look at. I’ve looked at people and wondered, “Where are you going?” or “What’s life like for you today?” and unless I go up and actually ask, I’ll never know. It’s weird that you pass so many people that you don’t know a thing about. They can fool everyone by plastering a smile on their face while they know themselves that that’s not what they feel like. People are so deceiving, even if they don’t mean to be.

Photo’s aren’t just a hobby, they become memory’s. When my mind becomes foggy and forgetful, I’ll always have the pictures of the many faces I’ve photographed, of the earth, of the moon and sun and of people.